Silence is Just Another Word for Love
by benignmilitancy
Summary: Tim has a secret Curly and Angela will know no limits to keep. NOW COMPLETE!
1. Chapter 1

_A/N: I don't own The Outsiders._

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><p>Angela and me didn't always agree on what to call it when there was a real emergency and we needed to split. At home we called it <em>the bitch<em>, but cussin's not too hot a tamale in school, if you know what I mean. We spent half an hour in detention—Angie just _had _to call that girl fat, although her cereal bowl sure came with a lifeguard, didn't it, Ang?—thinking about it, and at the end of the day Angie was left staring at a piece of paper as empty as her head, and me tossing around all the paper airplanes I'd throw at Mr. Addison's head while the bumfuck was busy sleeping at his desk.

Every day, Angie would get off the bus about five blocks from our street to cut across the Curtises' backyard. (I feel sorry for you, Pony. But trust me—she hasn't caught you in the shower yet!) I'd have to follow her because Tim said he'd kill me if anyone tried anything funny. To Angie? Ha. I rolled my eyes and said, _Who'd touch a grease-rag like her? _and before I could fucking sneeze, the guy's fist came crashing down right where it hurt, just like lightning; it hit me before I even knew I was struck.

_Damn._

Then Tim would go into the living room and sink in his chair, just like always. He had a funny way of sittin' down; see, he'd walk real slow to the chair, like molasses, and just kind of fold his legs in on himself. That was the way he did it at home. When he went out, he slammed his ass down on the stool like he was anybody's Marlon Brando. But everything about him was different at home—I dunno where the hell all these guys got their right going around saying my brother's the shit at the bottom of the cereal box—and we needed to keep it that way. It wasn't easy when I got slammed, though. I'd have to leave the rest to Dal and Ang, and you know those two...one time Dally got slammed for petty larceny and was put in the cell next to me. I asked him what he froze for. He smirked and said he took all week of Tim's bitching without a single complaint, but left behind a blazing trail the minute Angie bust open the front door and announced that her PMS could suck it.

Tim acted like it was some capital fucking offense when I got back from the cooler. Who the hell did he expect me to be anyway, Beaver Fucking Cleaver? _Real life ain't like that, Tiny Tim_, I thought. Hell—he drove me to the reformatory twice himself. I told him the second time that if he didn't want me around, he should just leave me there. When I said this, though, he got this weird-ass look on his face, like I'd just told him I shot my sister with Dad's old Smith and Wesson, and his eyes got real quiet and bright and red.

But it lasted for only a minute before he went back to that stone mask we were all so fucking used to.

"Curl," he said. "Get the _hell_ out."

So I did.

"Remember to write," I said as he drove away.

* * *

><p>"How's the bitch today?" Angie asked without looking up from her comic book.<p>

"She's alright," Tim said, flicking open the milk carton tab.

"Dally?"

He grinned in between swills. "Shit, Angie-Baby, you shoulda seen it—I sent your boyfriend groveling home with his tail in between his legs."

We glanced wearily at each other. Apparently Dallas slashed his tires and had been gloating about it all day. So Tim was his daily penance of whoop-ass, and took it outta him by any means necessary.

Angie's eyes narrowed. "Timmy—your hand's twitching."

"I know. I struck a nerve there when Dally came back around at me with a left and I tried to block it," he said, swatting her away when she leaned in to touch it. "It's fine. It'll go away if you let it alone."

Then he dropped the milk.

"Shit," he said, bending down to wipe it off. But now he kept dropping the cloth. His eyes narrowed, trying to fix themselves.

He began murmuring to himself.

"Hey," I said. "You feeling alright?"

His head snapped up. "Yeah," he said to Angela. "What? Are you gonna start touching me, too?"

"No, she isn't. You need more sleep...you look like a cat who got stuck in a microwave," I said.

"I'm fine, Ang. Don't touch me."

I looked at her. She shrugged. I should have known better...the drunk-ass. "Look at me—_I'm_ talking," I said, pointing to myself, "and no one's touching you. Now let's get you upstairs."

"Just don't touch me, got it?"

"Tim—"

His face twisted into a colorless ball. "_Don't you touch me!_"

Angie didn't even have time to react. She just went down. I'd never forget that sound his fist made against her nose—like a hiss or a pop, but with a little more bang, like something being cracked open...like the earth cracking open under a sudden bolt of lightning. Her nose cracked open just like that, and blood flooded out of her nostrils so hard and so deep it was almost purple.

And then there was a loud, broken wail as she staggered against the wall.

I exploded from my chair and put all my weight forward into spearing myself into Tim's legs. The first place you try to get any big guy is in the legs—anything to get their balance off. That's what I wanted to do, knock him down, shift his balance, stun him a little; these things never turn out as nice and neat as they do in the movies. Paul Newman never had a mass of blood so red it was purple running down his perfect little chin. Vivien Leigh never stood in a corner the way Angie did, a mixture of hate and shock and fear and God knows what else spewing out of her eyes—

He went around me, trying to get up, and I ducked all the obvious swings. Two minutes later I heard a stiff crack...his head against the floor.

I don't remember much after that, just that I had him pinned with my knee on his throat.

"_Oh my God, you're killing him!_" my sister screamed, her face purple and swollen and bleeding as she wrapped her arms around my neck and tried to pry me away. "_You're killing him! Get off! Get OFF!_"

I always told myself the day I won a fight against my brother was the day I'd finally be free. We had an understanding that this was more a suicide unit than a family. Everything as we knew it was so fucked-up—the way Dad died and Mom left, the way Tim had to be both for us and how we killed some little part of him every time we looked up to him; the way we killed ourselves every fucking day, the way we trudged around the war zone and said you can't die until I fucking say so.

It'd be the day when he'd open his mouth and realized he had nothing remarkable to say. But, watching him writhe there on the floor, his eyes fixed and distant on me, it might just be the day I'd lose him altogether.

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><p>I should have known something was wrong when he came to my room later. Motherfucker didn't even knock, just <em>boom<em>, he was standing there as if he were a fuckin' sequoia tree springing up from the middle of the floorboards.

Wrong—very, very wrong...I should have just taken Angie and left the house altogether. But I imagined the two of us roaming the street in the middle of the night, cold as anything and bug-bitten twice over, or, if Angie-Baby played her cards right, swooning over Ponyboy as Darry stared at us from the top of his newspaper and Soda opened his big fat mouth to ask where in the Sam Hill our brother sent us this time.

Either way we were screwed.

"Curly," he said. "Can I tell you something?"

"Depends," I said. "Anything to do with giving Angie an apology?"

He looked up. He was thinking about it. Angie was bleeding her guts out her nose because of him, and the bastard was _thinking _about it. "No."

"Then shuddup."

"Listen," he said. "This might be the only time I'll ever be able to say this."

I was listening.

"Something's wrong," he said, too slowly.

* * *

><p>It seemed as Tim got older he got slower. He wasn't a real athlete anyway, so none of us thought much of it when he couldn't pull his punches like he used to. He was just a normal guy.<p>

But, I guess, he did have something weird happen to him. He used to be able to take out a pocket knife and do this trick where he laid his hand—or _your_ hand, if the fee was right—flat against a table, spread his fingers apart, and stab all the spaces in between at lightning speed—and I'm not lying when I say this guy was fucking super_sonic_. He was recorded by the number of knife marks he left on the table; his fastest time had been sixty-seven clips in forty-eight seconds. But as he got older, he got slower, and—what was weird to me—clumsier. Lord knows all the fights he'd gotten into when he'd clipped Dally's hand more than a few times.

That was also how Tim almost lost a finger when he turned eighteen. I wasn't sure if it was because of the slowness or not, because the dumbass hadda get drunk on top of that—I got a neighbor to drive him to the hospital, and then stayed at home all night long waiting for the telephone to ring. When they decided to keep him at the hospital the next day, I went up to his room to go straighten some things around, and found Angie squatted on the floor, crying in the middle of it.

The entire room was spattered with blood.

My fucking heart slammed against my ribcage.

She said that during the night she had wandered into his room, thinking it was mine—and she found the blood spattered like paint across the walls. She said she looked around and found two more knives he had tucked under the bed—one a Swiss, one a switch.

_God damn you, Tim,_ I thought, wishing I could die right then, _the poor kid's only eight._

I told her some made-up fairy-tale shit about how the blades bit him because he wasn't treating 'em fair. After that, I carried her to the bathroom, made her wash off her face and hands, laid her down in my bed where she wanted to be, and an hour later she was finally able to get some sleep. But now I was scared shitless, too. I wished I had someone to tell me a lie, a fairy tale, anything with a reason, anything with a cause, a what, a _why_...but there was only silence in the blackness of the bloodstains that crusted on the pillows.

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><p><em>Yea? Nay? OK? <em>

_A/N to Self: I need to get going on cookies and reviewers._


	2. Chapter 2

_A/N #1.) I'm sick...my throat hurts like a bitch. Just thought that was worthy of its own A/N. ;D_  
><em><br>A/N #2.) K. Nefertiti...thanks for your review! I am continuing! Cookies for you! ...If I don't cough on them, lol._  
><em><span>TaylorPaige<span>...aww, that means so much to me. Cookies for you!_

_A/N #3.) Cookies to all reviewers...you know you want some...mmmmm..._

_A/N #4.) On the topic of OCs: yeah. They're in this story. Don't freak out; I don't use OCs that often. And furthermore, they're boy OCs! So y'all can set your double-barrel shotguns down now. XD_

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><p>Tim wasn't there to greet me when I came home this morning. Go figure.<p>

It was still early, and the sky was just a few wisps of pink against a flat milky gray, like those colors you see when you cut open uncooked hamburger. My fingers were frozen even with the filter I had jammed in my mouth, so I sprinted up the steps as fast as I could and kicked the door open at the threshold, where it was weakest. The front door's got a deadbolt, but one time I figured out that if you tapped the door a certain way beforehand, you could kick it open from the bottom. The first time I tried it, I was smashed to pieces. Tim locked the doors every night. So I, the genius without a key or a clue, had remembered those Sean Connery movies after all.

_Shit!_ I thought as a blast of cold hit me. I don't know how Angie slept with that kind of ball-freezing cold. Then again, I thought miserably, she didn't have any balls to freeze.

I ran up to her room, which was dark and small—also the warmest, 'cause it was always painfully fuckin' obvious who Tim loved better—with a few pieces of wallpaper starting to droop down from the corners in the walls. What's with the pictures? Angie wanted to be a photographer. She kept the "practice" pictures—mostly of me and Tim—in the drawer, and the pictures she was proud of on top of the basin: Bryon, Mark, and M&M that time they went to Canada; a black-and-white copy she took of the Curtises for their family portrait; her friend Cathy looking up at a street sign; a bleary-eyed Dallas flipping off the camera.

Her camera sat in a big black case. Her bed beside it was just a mattress on the floor—no money for a frame—so Tim had worked his ass off to pay for that camera on her thirteenth birthday. The first month she had it, she wore it around her neck like a diamond necklace.

I ripped the covers off.

"Ang!" I shouted. "You turn on the furnace yet?"

"Go do it yourself," she whined, rolling over.

"Oh, yeah," I said, "let the guy with the butt-kicker hangover do it and break his neck falling down the stairs!"

She glared right at me; she looked like hell. "Maybe if the guy with the butt-kicker hangover didn't get smashed up so often, we wouldn't be having this problem now, would we?"

I turned and, despite her glaring daggers at me, started toward the stairs. I knew she was taller than me, but she wouldn't be able to keep up. I'll admit, I was kind of a little guy, so I was a slippery fish to catch."What the hell's that supposed to mean?"

"I mean that you go out every night, and get drunk off your rocker banging up chicks and cars smoking God-knows-what, and half the time they have to cart you back home on a stretcher, and you never call to say where you are, and you expect me to be home all the time smiling my face off like June Cleaver when you stumble in and Tim's here hurting like he does, and_ dammit, Curly, I'm still talking to you!_" she screamed, her feet pounding the stairwell. "_Don't you go down there when I'm—_"

"Mornin'," Winston smiled.

I didn't even think. I landed a slug shot right across his face. He staggered a little bit, then pulled himself up and began laughing like a moron. I thought I saw him wipe off a little red from under his nose. "Not bad," he said, "soon you just might be able to beat the flies off your face."

Angela glared at the empty space between us.

"Lookit the time—aw, hell, while we were just startin' to have some fun, too," he murmured, glancing at the clock. I didn't know if that loud noise was the clock ticking or my heart pounding."Don't look like I'll be sticking around much longer." He crossed the room, slamming the coffee pot down on the table. "Nothing works in this dump heap anyway."

I was ready to kill him. "Listen—did Tim go to work?"

Dally took the coffee can out of the fridge. When he was especially hung over he would chew the grinds dry, to sober up faster or something like that, the fucking weirdo.

He sniffed: "Why should I care?"

"'Cause if you came all the way over here just to ball my sister, I'm gonna rip your thing off and shove it down your throat," I said, ignoring Angie's eyes burning holes in my face. "If it's as big as you say it is, then you should have no trouble suffocating."

"Come on, Curl," Angie protested. "We go through this every morning, and it's never what you think it is. Why can't you trust me?"

"I trust you," I said, "it's _him_ who gives me the fucking hives every mornin'."

"You think I like being stuck here all day while you run around?" she said, thrusting a finger into my chest. "With nowhere to go and nothing to do, huh? You think I _like_ it having to watch Timwhen he's sick and Dallas is over here knocking up drinks with him?"

"Wouldn't be the only thing gettin' knocked up in here," I mumbled.

"_Curly!_"

I looked up, tapping my forehead. "Look, Ang, just use your pea brain for once and put two and two together, alright? Don't you be callin' me out—just 'cause you got a puss in your pants don't mean you own the place."

"Or toys in the attic," Dally said over his cigarette.

I curled my upper lip back as he smiled at me. It was like a bad dream you kept having over and over—every morning I'd come home to this. Cut. Shot. Rewind. Just looking at Dallas' face made my heart pound and my eyes see red. The way he smirked—like he would rub my face in it if he touched Angie—made my skin crawl. But she was too young, and luckily the motherfucker knew me and Tim would run him straight into the ground the minute he'd try. Still, that face made me uneasy. It was something in the mouth, that little line people get near their mouths when they wanna say something for a real long time but don't. Dally had it in a deep little fold at the end of his. That was just the way he was. He wasn't opening his yaw. He wasn't saying nothing. His mouth just quivered a little, and he'd smile at you for looking.

Sometimes I still think that was a good thing and a bad thing.

Ages passed before the door swung open.

"What's goin' on here?" Tim said, then spotting Dally, greeted: "Go fuck yourself, Winston."

"That's what we got opposable thumbs for, baby."

Tim ignored him and sauntered into the room. Oh God, he didn't look good. The bitch was riding him good today—I hoped he was trying his damnedest to hide that swoon. "Any of you know where my pills are?"

"You mean your Piriton, " Dally said, flicking out his light. We had always told him that Tim had allergies, but somehow, I think he knew better.

"Yeah. You didn't take them, did you?"

Dally shrugged, pointing his weed nowhere in particular. "What do I look like, an acid pusher?"

"You just might," Tim said as he began ripping the cabinets out. "_Damn_ it, I should know where my own goddamn pills are."

"Apparently," Angie confirmed, picking the bottle up off the floor. He sighed and went across the room to go get it. I watched the way his shadow wobbled a little as his heels clicked the floor, thinking maybe he must have dropped it on the floor and forgot, or something—

Then my mind flashed, and I thought of Tim, alone in the car, having another episode.

My bones got cold and stiff.

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><p><em>I've gotta find a better class of losers to run with<em>, I thought as I sat smack-dab in the middle of first period's melee. Blood boiled over the rim at school. Everyone killed each other during homeroom, and the rest of the day was like you were going in to bomb fucking Hanoi. That butt-kicker hangover didn't do much to help matters; I couldn't hear myself think. We all guffawed as some Soc kept trying to explain to Ms. Greton that in America a _greaser_ wasn't another word for hamburger.

The greenest teacher we ever had was the one we got for theater class. They liked tryin' somethin' new every year, and this year all of the different _grades _were grouped together—or grease, hood, and _Soc_, if you weren't fucking brain-dead—in one class. Ponyboy signed up for theater because he was a pussy; Angie signed up because she was in love with said pussy; I signed up because I thought it'd be fun laughing my ass off at Angie-Baby trying to be some silky-suave Elizabeth Taylor; Johnny signed up because he was Pony's tail; and Two-Bit signed up because of Ms. Greton.

What a sleazeball.

Ms. Greton was blond, thin, and _British_. You think you know British? No. This lady was British as in straight from the Merry Old Land of Oz British. _She's so Brit she pisses out Earl Grey__,_ Angie said. We'd fall asleep in class because we never understood half of what she was saying, and she'd accuse Two-Bit of rolling in drunk and late—which all of the teachers did—and we'd just roll our eyes as she scolded his smiling ass for being _One over the eight again, Mr. Matthews? _

Two-Bit swore up and down he hated Ms. Greton, but I still say he had a thing for her. Me and Angie argued about it all the time. We were never sure if he wanted to whang-bang the teacher or ship her off on the next boat to Oz...he was a real strange cat like that.

"It's the chain-gang," a greaser announced from the window.

There were five of them. Coming in, they looked like those spics in _West Side Story:_ Dean, Tom, Two-Bit, Dennis, and Bennie, pulling up in a big red Corvette that laid patch all over the courtyard concrete. They all wore black to hide the fact that their clothes had been sooted over with ash and sweat, and they pretty much exploded into school.

Two-Bit was first, running in whooping like an Iroquois. He had a grin plastered to his face, wearing square black sunglasses about a mile too big for it.

Then came in Dean and Dennis McLaughlin, the grease-twins in desperate need of some home-cooked ass-whuppins. They lived down the street, a little ways across the tracks. They blasted Rolling Stones records at three in the morning and were almost as bad as the Socs with wild window-smashing house parties. You could hear them clear across the tracks in the middle of the night because, in their world, nothing ever happened unless it happened in the middle of the fucking night. Dean, the bigger one, was okay in small doses. He was a pushover and he'd leave you alone if you roughed him up a bit. Dennis was the real one in command, even though he made it look like Dean was the leader. He's tried to spit on Tim a few times and he flashed my sister once when he was pissing on an electric fence—I swear, that kid would play chicken with a subway train.

Next to Two-Bit, who was clinically insane, Tom Blackwell was the biggest dipshit Tulsa had ever seen. Once, Dean had been driving by the recruiting station at about 30 miles over the speed limit when the jackass decided it was a _marvelous_ idea to stick his head out the window and scream _Nam can suck my Cong!_ at the top of his lungs. Dean had a brain between his ears and pulled him back into the car before his head got lopped off by a rail crossing, the goody bastard. If I were him I would have just let him scream on.

Bennie...was just plain odd. I didn't like the way he laughed—like listening to a fucking hyena.

"Didn't y'all hear? Two-Bit and a bunch of other kids got caught burning their draft notices this morning," Johnny said, turning to Pony. "You think they're gonna get in trouble?"

"I don't think so. They probably got deferments," Pony said.

"What's a deferment?"

"If someone has a health problem, goes to college or has a family to take care of or something, they don't have to go," he said. "Darry has one. Those kids that were burning their notices this morning probably got a piece of paper from the government saying they don't have to go."

Angie said: "So if it doesn't even matter, why'd they do it in the first place?"

Ponyboy shrugged. "Looks good on TV, I guess."

A few groups of us stuck together, like putty, in the corners. Bobby Jay, the son of the guy who owned Jay's, stuck his paws in his pockets and grinned down at Two-Bit. His dad was a great big guy like he was—strongside linebacker in high school—but _damn_, that oversized hood was too dumb to piss in a straight line. He was a real weirdo, too—he liked Dally—and we used to get back at him by calling him _the_ _big prick with a tiny dick. _Suffice to say, Daddy Jay didn't like that too much. One time a guy got knifed in the adjacent parking lot after he called Bobby Jay that, and afterward we were all good and careful to keep our mouths shut around him... Sometimes. "Hey there, grease-bucket, you're late! Why're your clothes all sooty?"

"Don't you know? I'm actually Santa Claus," Two-Bit said, lifting an eyebrow as he reached up and smacked Bobby Jay in the face. "While you were asleep, I slid down the chimney, stuffed myself in a big red stocking, and nailed myself to your mother's mantle." He threw his head back to howl with the wolves. "Merry Fuckin' Christmas, Bobby Jay! Ho, ho, ho!"

"_Hey! Who over there's callin' my ex a ho, ho, ho? _"someone shouted from across the room, and Two-Bit laughed so hard he fell out of his chair.

* * *

><p>I was eleven years old when I took away all the knives and forks in the house. I kept butter knives and spoons inside a little safe with a lock combination I kept in my head because I was too scared to write it down.<p>

Tim was in the living room, lying on the couch as he studied his bandaged hand, stained a rusted orange-red where he almost severed the finger. "I've got to get used to the bitch," he murmured. "I've got to get used to it. She's here to stay, Curly. I know what I did scared you and Angie-Baby something fierce, but...I've got to get used to her however I can."

I said, "You don't have to kill yourself, Timmy."

He dropped his hand and stared at the ceiling for a while. Then he looked at his hand and said, too softly: "If I don't, she will."

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><p><em>ROMEO &amp; JULIET<em>.

"Who are they?" Ms. Greton said.

"Umm," Tom said, smiling sweetly and folding his hands as her stare bored into him. "They're Romeo and Juliet...?"

We tried not to laugh as she sighed and walked over to Two-Bit. "Please tell me _you_ got the reading last night, Mr. Matthews."

"Yes'm," he nodded, winking at his buddies. "I got_ the_ _reading_ last night."

Another wave of knowing chuckles passed. "Oh God," Pony said, turning redder by the minute. Johnny looked like he was about to get shot.

"Summarize the play for me, if you would be so kind."

"It's about two kids who fall in love," he said, and when Ms. Greton nodded, added: "And who wanna get it on, but hafta sneak around town and shit 'cause they're too goody-goody to tell their parents to blow it out their ass—"

"_We don't know him_,_ Johnny,_" Pony whispered. "_Just say we never seen him before—"_

"—at least, that's what my buddy Ponyboy Curtis told me," he said, and then stomped the ground pointing at Pony's beet-red face.

* * *

><p>I was eleven years old when the doctors showed me the definition they used to call it. It was printed in tiny black letters inside a book bigger than I was:<p>

_multiple sclerosis_— _common demyelinating disorder of the central nervous system, causing patches of sclerosis (plaques) in the brain and spinal cord; occurs primarily in young adults, and has protean clinical manifestations, depending on the location and size of the plaque._

MS. That was the doctors' name for it, a fancy, clean-shaven name. They didn't know it, no. They didn't know it like we knew it. They just slapped a label on it and said _Next._

MS. All those years we knew it was dirty, bloody, vulgar, filthy; it was a slut, a whore, a cunt, filled with blood and shit and pills and convulsions, filled with things too dark to see and things to low to hear. It was like being trapped in the middle of the desert with every direction pointing you to eternity. It was crushing loneliness when you were never alone, like you being alien to yourself. It was night after night and day after day of sitting and staring and holding our breath, wondering who was gonna be the first to pop.

The only other one who knew anything was Dally. He never said anything about it, but to be honest, I think he knew it the minute he met Tim. You could see it in his face; he just never said anything. He was good about it, I guess; he'd agree to keep Tim company whenever he got tired of _watching the Wonder siblings runnin' around town like headless fucking chickens_.

MS. Whore. It took up every inch of Tim's body and always wanted more. "Hello, darling," he said, almost sighing when I showed him the definition in the book, "so you're the bitch I've been looking for."

* * *

><p>"We have to get out of here," I whispered to Angie, "and go to the pharmacy. He's got the bitch bad today, and I doubt Dallas knows what to do when he starts twitching. He thinks he's been winking at him for the past two weeks."<p>

"I know, but—we can't take any more time out of class."

"We'll be back before you know it if you keep your mouth shut_..._you know, the usual stuff."

"Yeah," she said, smiling or grimacing—I couldn't tell. "The usual stuff."

"Mr. _Shepard_," Two-Bit cut in with Ms. Greton's window-shattering shrill. "If you wish to receive good marks in this class, I _insist_ you put in your share of ass-in-chair." He clamped a hand down on my shoulder. "Now, if you would, Mr. Shepard, please glue those two greasy ass-cheeks directly to your seat, and kindly shut that filthy trap you use to kiss your bloody tart of a mother with, I would be much obliged to give you only three spankings after school today—or, as we say in jolly old London, _applause for your naughty buttocks._"

"Yes sir, Ms. Greton, sir," I said.

"Ms. Greton" grinned, and turned around to the second row. He tapped on Pony's desk and said: "Pip, pip, Mr. Curtis, Mr. Cade. Shall we be moving along now, before the entire school realizes I have been a naughty-naughty and pulled the fire alarm again?" He picked up Pony and Johnny by their collars before they could say anything, then bowed to us in salutation and sprinted down the hall. "Righty-ho, then, you jaunty villeins!"

* * *

><p>If they knew Tim was sick, that was it. The state would deem him unfit to be our guardian and we'd get carted.<p>

It'd have been different if he had been tough for himself, like Dally or Bobby Jay or me, but no. He was tough for all three of us. That has to be the hardest fucking thing anyone could ever ask you to do—but the thing is, no one ever asked him to. He just did it. I don't care if he was sick or not. That's fucking tough.

That was also why I was always afraid for him. Tim played a dangerous game. Every guy, every greaser, every hood, every Soc, every jackass, every dropout, every delinquent in the world eventually has to suck up his shit and realize he's only human. But some people just go too far. At some point you get so tough, you don't even know what it means to be tough anymore. You lose the principle of the thing. I think that's what happened to Dallas. He lost his principle; he lost his reason for being tough. He just went drinking and running around and running away smashing up people and places and things, flying wild like a bullet without a target. Tim was different. Tim always needed to stand to lose something. At least, that's what I had hoped.

Once upon a time, in the magical land of the West side, Tulsa got slammed with the worst winter on record. No one had any power. Water pipes froze. Howling wind battered the shutters off of windows as the temperature plummeted to thirty below zero and under. Tim never talked about it, but what I could remember was that all of us sat huddled on the bed, too scared to cry because our tears might freeze—and hungry, and shivering, and halfway-dead. Mom said she'd go out to find Dad. She never came back. I held Angie and we sat in the corner trying not to cry.

Tim was ten, Tim was numb, and Tim wasn't sure if we would survive the night.

I'll never know how he did it. Surviving, I mean. Some guys can't even manage that. But Tim did it alone, for three of us, filling two big gaping holes where a Mom and a Dad were supposed to be—he was fucking tough enough for a hundred of us.

* * *

><p>We only had two more blocks to cut across and we were home free. I'll admit it—Angie tried to warn me. She did. "Curly—"<p>

"Shut it," I hissed.

"But—"

"I said_ shut_—"

Then I stopped.

A shadow hovered behind me at the base of my neck, staring at me, just standing there, blocking out the sun. It reached out and put a hand on my shoulder. I whirled around with a stiff bitch-slap and it reeled a little bit, muttering something irritatedly.

I heard Angie scream, but it was short; it began strong and died in her throat for some reason. Any other time she'd have been wailing like a banshee. I almost lost my cool after that and I started swinging, screaming, but he—I was pretty sure it was a he—caught my fist in his hand like it was nothing. Then, before I could get a real good look at him, he took my collar and slammed me onto the ground. Strange thing, though, it didn't hurt. Usually when you get jumped, they go all out to make sure you don't get up in the morning.

I flicked out my blade, and his heel came crashing down on my wrist.

"Oh no, you're not," he said.

I felt like digging my own grave and jumping in it when I looked up and saw that red face scowling down at me.

Darrel.

* * *

><p><em>AN: Super science time, kids! In the '60s it was believed that MS was caused by infection and could be treated with antibiotics. That's the dealio with Tim and his pills. Class dismissed!_


	3. Chapter 3

_A/N: Cookies! Cookies go to all reviewers!_

_TaylorPaige24: HOORAY FOR INTERESTING-NESS! LOL. XD Thanks so much for your reviews. Cookies for you!  
><span>ILovePepsi2<span>: No, you got it right the first time. Cookies for you! =D_

* * *

><p>For some weird reason, one of Mom's old rhymes popped into my head as the sun blazed in my eyes: <em>Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.<em>

"Blade," he said. "On the ground."

I looked at him. He twisted his heel back so I couldn't fight. Felt like he could crush the bones in my arm if he wanted to. I knew fighting would be useless anyway. I'd seen that guy slug giants before. Fighting him's fighting a two-ton wall of muscle.

His heel pressed harder into my wrist. I felt a slow sting sink into the meat of my palm…heat poured out of it. But I wasn't letting go—I'd rather cut off my own hand, old man—

_Red sky at night, sailor's delight._

"Now," he said.

I wouldn't let him make a dud of me like that so I settled for the next best thing.

I threw it onto the ground.

Darry slowly lifted his heel off my wrist.

"We were just starting to strip the shingles from the roof," he said. "You kids would've gotten hit with a storm of nails and five-pound shingles if I hadn't pulled you away. What's that supposed to mean, you didn't _see_ us? We're right up there! What in the Sam Hill are you two thinking? And aren't you two supposed to be in sch—"

"We're not," Angie said.

He glanced at the sun, which hung huge and red in the sky.

He looked back down, lifting his eyebrows. "No?"

"_No_," I reaffirmed, spitting the word at him.

He didn't even blink before looking me right between the eyes and saying: "You wanna mouth off, boy, I ain't got no problems hauling your ass to the station."

I took a slow step forward.

The train was coming. Time to play chicken.

"If you ain't got no problems carting me, then I got _no_ _god__damn_ _peachy-keen problems_ picking up the phone and dialing Carron's," I said. The day before, I had overheard Ponyboy mention to Johnny that a social worker had come over and told Darry that if either of his brothers got in trouble with the law, they'd get carted before he could even blink. "Maybe it wasn't Two-Bit who burned his draft." He frowned. "Who knows? Play nice with me, Darrel, and maybe I'll just dial the wrong number. Beg, and maybe I'll just hang up. Grovel, and maybe, just maybe…maybe I'll say I just saw Sodapop do it instead."

His eyes narrowed. Just like playing chicken, I thought. The sting in my hand throbbed, and my head started to pound slowly out of my skull, radiating pins and needles all over my nerves. My muscles twitched. Something cold crawled up my back as he stared at me, not saying anything for forever. I tried not to have any expression on my face. Tabula rasa, baby. Just like playing chicken... It's you or the train.

Angie stepped between us. It was kinda funny, the way she was so tough in school and at home and everything—now she just looked like some curly-black-haired grease-puppy about to get squashed by the Jolly Green Giant."Look, Darrel, the truth is—"

"Angela's got MS," I blurted.

Darry blinked. "What?"

Angie squeezed her eyes so tight the veins in her forehead stuck out.

"Angela's got...MS," I repeated, this time more slowly.

Dammit. What was I gonna do now? I dodged the train but threw Angie under it at the last minute. I could hear her angry dying screams ringing in my ears: _You_ _dodged, you dirty little chicken-shit! _

I winced a little on the inside. _Smoosh._

"Why couldn't you tell me this before?"

My heart thudded, and I could think of three good reasons.

_Number One: You're not us._

_Number Two: You're not us._

_Number Three: You're not us._

"We have a hard time explaining it," I said. "Most people don't understand. Or they run away 'cause they think they're gonna catch it or something."

"Curly," Angie said.

I didn't like that look on her face—or the one on Darrel's, for that matter—

Another incoming train.

Oh God. Not now.

Please not now.

"Curly," Angela said. Her face turned white and twisted. She kept clutching at her throat with her hands, tugging at the collar of her shirt. "Curly—I think—I'm gonna—I'm gon—"

She popped all over the concrete.

Now…I know I'm supposed to love 'er and all that shit, and I do—but I just have to say, there's times in life when you look at your sister and can think nothing but a big fat flaming: _YOU LITTLE DYKE._

Needless to say, today was one of those days.

* * *

><p>Luckily, that was all the proof Darry needed. He left patch on the pavement when he dumped us off, though, but I didn't care—I got a little satisfaction out of knowing Soda was gonna get the leather on his ass today.<p>

I went up to the pharmacist, a man with thinning hair and glasses so big they almost fell off his nose, and asked for Shepard, pointing to Ang (the aforementioned dumbass being wide-eyed and glued shitless to a chair). I killed the time by drumming my fingers against the counter. I was scanning the area—you never knew when some fucker was gonna pop out from behind a corner and scream "hood" at you as if it were a fucking drive-by.

After about twenty minutes passed, he came back out carrying a clipboard. "Let's see...Polymyxin B Sulfate?"

"Does that sound right?" I whispered. Angie shrugged.

I turned around. "Yeah," I said.

"I'm sorry," he said, "says here someone's already taken out Polymyxin for _Shepard._ Have I mistaken your order for someone else's?"

Scowling, I jerked the clipboard away from him. There on the dotted black line the name read, in thin, hasty chicken-scratch:

_D. Winston._

* * *

><p>Tim laid on his back on the couch, wearing nothing but a pair of torn-up jeans, a long purple welt running from his temple to his chin, an ice pack, and a grim smile.<p>

"We're all broken in this family," he said cheerfully, his voice rising with the brightness of his smile. "We might as well be _one big happy fucked-up VA unit in this house!"_ I put my hand over my aching head. Saw some blood. My hand had closed over the sharp part of my blade when Darrel's foot came crashing down on my wrist. Angela just looked pale._ "'Cause Lord knows it sure wouldn't be home __sweet home without somebody killing themselves or doing something to get them carted to a home all the way in fucking Canada every other fucking week, now, would it? And is it such a fucking bother for you two to say yes or no half the time—even a fuck off? No, Timmy, I don't think it would!_"

I listened to Tim ramble on and on about how our household was the M.A.S.H. version of the Brady Bunch before Dallas kicked the couch and he winced.

"He's just sore 'cause he wouldn't pay the hooker what she wanted," Dally explained. Tim tried to smack him in the rib, where he had broken it before in the fight, but Dally dodged him by half an inch.

"This fucking tramp kept asking me for money," Tim said, closing his eyes while folding his arms over his chest, which I watched it as it rose and fell. Couldn't really say I was jealous of that blackbeard he had for chest hair. "Me and Dal kept tryin' to tell him to fuck off. We warned him—" He cracked one eye open. "What? Don't you say I didn't warn him—what did you just say? Oh, so that was _you_ in the corner pissin' your pants, you little chickenshit—" This time he found Dally's rib and smacked it good. "Anyway, he reached into my pocket, so I turned and belted him a good 'un. Broke his nose straight off. But then the stiff comes swinging around with a busted pop bottle, and_ hocus-pocus_—" He ran his fingers along the welt, grinning. "—Timmy's got himself new tread on the tires."

I said nothing. Angela kept shaking her head.

"Aw, what the hell's the matter with you now?" he grunted.

"You idiot," she murmured, laying her head onto his. "You fucking_ idiot_."

Tim almost smiled.

"I hate you too, Angie-Baby."

* * *

><p>And after Tim had <em>finally <em>fell asleep around midnight, I tried kicking Dally out, as always. You wanna get polished, you always gotta lay some sandpaper on your nerves.

You can polish Winston just as much as you can polish shit.

"Scram," I said, my voice getting high. My throat burned and it felt like someone was pushing my eyeballs out of their sockets. He kept standing in the doorway of Angie's room, smirking slow like a Cheshire, frozen. I was so mad I thought I was gonna pop.

"If you hadn't had me around, he'd probably be pushing daisies ten times over," Dally said, flicking the ash of his weed into my face. "Look, I ain't Two-Bit, alright? You don't think I can keep my trap shut when I need to?"

I knew he could when he needed to, but only when he decided it was necessary. That was the problem. You got a bunch of guys deciding for themselves what's necessary to keep secret, and you wind up with a bigger mess than the one you started out with. The world was just too filled with those guys as it was.

Angie's nostrils flared. "So you knew all this time, and you didn't say anything?"

"Wanted to see how long you two could keep a secret from me," he said, shrugging as if he were telling us he went to the store to buy booze. "Three or four years, is it? Not bad."

"I swear to God, Dally, if you're making fun of us—"

"Making fun of you? What's there to make fun of, besides the usual?" he said, flicking out his lighter. "I'm not making fun of you. I'm tellin' you you got a good thing going for keepin' your secrets straight. Hell, Two-Bit told me his dad died in Korea the week I met 'im. Showed me the discharge papers and everything."

He crossed the room, scooped up all of Angie's pictures, and flung them in a great big heap out the window. A cat shrieked in the alley below and my gut wrenched with the crash of glass on tar.

"_What the hell are you doing?_" she shrieked.

"You need to keep anything sharp out of reach," he explained as he shut the window. "Crazy people are experts at finding ways to hurt themselves. Even things you think they wouldn't use, keys, picture frames, plugs, pens...don't take that chance. Throw them away or lock them up—I saw a guy skewer a guard with a loose bedspring once."

He must have seen us staring at him, because he added: "When I was about twelve, I did something extra-naughty. I'm not gonna tell you what it is. But it bought me a first-class ticket to a men's penitentiary in downtown Brooklyn. One of the inmates there had MS, and he had it _bad—_you put them side by side,Tim's a fuckin' four-star runner compared to this guy—and none of the wards would touch him. They all thought he had leprosy. So they pretty much made me take care of him until he got the chair. See, he had snapped—he had cut up his wife with a paring knife. He hated his wife, man. Wouldn't shut up about her." Dally crossed his arms. "Sometimes he thought _I_ was his wife, the fuck-ass creeper."

"Why?"

"Whatever happens in the cell stays in the cell," Dally said, turning towards me. "You think the coolers here are where the worst of it happens?" He smiled. "You don't know shit, little boy. You think you're entitled to your one phone call? No. They cut the wires the minute you pick up the receiver. You think you can say you're gonna jump off the Brooklyn Bridge? No. They tell you be sure not to hit any seagulls on the way down. You think the guards are gonna help you out when those hornboys in the courtyard get rough and rowdy?" He laughed wildly. "Ha! Good one. No—they _watch_ you tie a noose. They _help_ you make a shank out of a busted pipe. They _hand _you a loaded Desert Eagle and say, _Make my job a whole lot easier, hood._"

Angie blinked, studying a crack in the floor. She was trying. She was trying. "Dally?"

"What?"

"Why are you helping us?"

"Don't ask me—I don't know why."

"I think you do."

A long moment passed.

"I almost feel sorry for you," he added in a low voice.

There was a beat of silence.

Angela got up, crossed the room, and screamed right in Dally's face**:**

"_Shut up!"_

I took a step back. Even he looked startled for a second. She sat on the bed, folding her legs in on herself like Tim did after a particularly hard day, and she put her face in her hands. She was quivering.

The kitchen clock's ticking never seemed so loud.

"You know what's worse than having someone make fun of you," she said finally, soft poison rising in her voice, "is having someone say they feel _sorry_ for you. I don't need you to feel _sorry_ for me any more than I need you to blow me down with a fucking heater, Dally Winston. How _dare_ you? How dare youcome into _my_ house, act like you know what's best for _my_ brother, and then tell _me_ you feel sorry for _me_? How fucking _dare _you?"

Silence. Then she pounded down the stairs, looking like she was going to burst on fire. The train passed by...a midnight despot carrying coal west; red lights streaked the black.

_Red sky at night, sailor's delight._

"Dallas," I said.

"Fuck off."

I stared at the wall behind his head. I didn't understand it. Angie's temper tantrum already came and went—why'd he start acting moody now? "Whatever happened to that inmate?"

"That motherfucker," he said slowly, "was just like Tim. Awful smart. Maybe too smart." He looked down, crushing his cigarette into the floor. "You know what he told me before he got the chair?"

I shook my head.

"He said**:** _Silence is just another word for love._"

* * *

><p>I don't know. I don't know. I'm not really a superstitious person, but I think the world's falling apart. Even Two-Bit was getting awful strange lately, Dean and Dennis said on the way back home one night. Mostly it was him getting mixed up with time. He'd come to school thinking it was morning when all the kids were playing baseball in the vacant lot after school. Entire weeks would go by and nobody'd hear from him except for maybe the Curtis outfit—and even they said he'd disappear. Hell—even the Socs seemed extra-lonely now without another one of their usual wise-ass punching bags to rag on.<p>

One time he sauntered in the classroom, silent and red-eyed, plopped down in his chair, and lit up a weed. The teacher launched into monologue about the policy on smoking in school when—

Two-Bit raised an eyebrow.

And for the first time in her life, Ms. Greton was rendered speechless when he crushed the butt in the carpet with his heel, looked her straight in the eye, and told her to _kiss off back across the pond, or else shut your bloody Mary Poppins trap and kiss my greasy 'merican ass._

"Think it's got anything to do with getting canned?" I said.

"Curly," Dean said. "All of us got deferments."

Duh, Howdy Doody. God damn. "Well, that's 'cause y'all are just a bunch of yellow fuckin' pansies."

"Listen, Girly," Dennis hissed. "I'm only gonna say this once, so get it through your thick skull while you still can. _We _got our deferments because _we're_ going to college. I mean, we love the guy, but Two-Bit couldn't ball a chick without having to read the manual to figure out that his Rod A is supposed to go into her Slot B. You dig?"

I nodded, so he continued. "You think Nam wants him? Nam's afraid of him. You think we want him? He goes for long drives offa short cliffs and drags us along. You think his mom wants him? She cares 'bout as much as her foot in his ass when she's kicking him out the door. Come on, man, think. Think! Who'dya think wants Two-Bit around the most?"

"Who?" I repeated.

"Yeah, dumbass—who?_"_

Who'd want Two-Bit around the most?

"Think real hard, son."

I remembered what Pony had said about deferments. _Darry has one…if someone's got a health problem, goes to college or has a…_

_Think real hard, son._

_Son._

For some reason the word stuck in my mind.

"Kathy," I said, thinking nothing except for the way Angie'd practically flip off the roof when she heard—now or later?

I took a stiff drag on my weed.

"Kathy's pregnant."

Now. Definitely now.

* * *

><p><em>To be continued.<em>


	4. Chapter 4

_A/N: The parts in italics are memories. Hopefully the format won't make a mistake and think that all of the story's in italics...(crosses fingers) If it does, I apologize. The first half of this chapter's a few of Curly's memories._

* * *

><p>"<em>No wussin'," I told Ponyboy.<em>

"_No wussin'," he said._

"_First one to wuss out's gotta go ring the doorbell."_

"_First one to wuss out's gotta go ring the doorbell."_

"_No redoes. No crying. No shit."_

"_No redoes. No crying. No—" He looked sheepish, and muttered the last part under his breath. _

"_Good man," I said. "All right."_

_I handed him a stick and struck a match. I let it burn on the wick until the flame grew into a long hissing column of orange._

_We lit our cigarettes and jammed the butts into each other's fingertips._

_And we waited._

_The next thing I remember is sputtering and hacking and writhing on the ground, gripping my wrist so hard I almost cut off my circulation. Pools of sweat sodded my shirt. My fingertip smoldered, and my gut wrenched from the smell—like smelling your own fat hissing in a frying pan—a sour, sweet, smothered smell, like...like someone burning rotting meat with incense. I could imagine the car freshener now: Me Burning my Goddamn Finger Off. Jeebus. I hope I never smell anything like it ever again._

_And the pain—fuck the whore! FUCK HER GOOD! I laughed so hard tears streamed down my face. My nerves hissed like open electrical wires, screaming at me from every possible place on my body. All of the pain in my body blazed toward the pinpoint on my finger. I mean all of it. _

_Then, I realized with horror, Tim had pulled me away first. I heard him cuss Ponyboy out and chase him off our territory with a wiffleball bat._

_I stared at the gaping hole in my finger._

_No redoes. No crying. No shit._

* * *

><p>"<em>Curly," the doctor said, piercing my sleep.<em>

_I was fifteen again, sitting on the hard wooden bench they make you sit on in the waiting room. My chest throbbed. Angie had fallen asleep on me. The entire place stank of floor cleaner. I wondered if this was what caged dogs felt like—_

_He asked me a question. I nodded._

"_He was poking holes in his veins, trying to get used to the pain. But he hit too deep, and we almost couldn't stop the bleeding."_

_And I said Okay. _

_Looking back on it, I wish I had said more. Fucking idiot. All I said was Okay._

"_Timmy," Angie beamed when they wheeled him out. His smile sagged from his face. I wondered what the doctors did to him this time. He looked like he'd been through the wringer._

"_Hey there, Angelcake," he said, grinning tiredly. "You wanna see a trick? I can make this entire thing disappear."_

_Angie shook her head and declared Nuh-uh, he couldn't._

_He took her sucker away and swallowed it whole._

* * *

><p><em>The trick he showed me wasn't nearly as happy.<em>

_It was late at night, just a little while after he caught me and Ponyboy burning holes in each other's fingers. The kitchen light flickered. They told him that if he forgot another payment they'd shut everything off next month. All I could hear was the buzzing of flies tapping the screen door. Tap, tap, tap. Since then, I've gotten used to hating that sound. It always meant that Tim was thinking...about how he'd slay me._

_He opened his mouth a few times. He snapped it shut. Then he got up, pushing all of his weight on his wrists. He circled the table once, slowly, hungrily, his heels heavy and clicking. I could see my reflection glare back at me from the darkness of his blue-rimmed eyes. _

"_Let me tell you something," he said._

_He shoved my hand flat on the table. My finger smarted something awful as it hit the wood. _

_The skin on my hand glistened._

"_The world's just like a blade—sharp, clean, merciless. You slip once, and it will come to get you. You get out of your rhythm just once—you turn your head and blink—just once—"_

_Thud._

_The steak knife's hilt vibrated as it stood seven inches out of the table._

"_And your precious lil' piggies come right off."_

_My heart beat a little faster. Don't you come near me with that thing, I thought. I looked around, wondering where the nearest exit was—the kitchen window? I'd break my arm busting out of it but I'd still be kicking—wondering with racing thoughts where I'd go, or what I'd use if he came at me. I didn't want to fight, but...if he did...I needed to be ready for it._

"_Know what we are? We're the fingers on the same hand. We bleed, we hurt, we get dirty. We don't give a damn about nothing so long as we can do it. But you cut off any one'a us, and we won't ever be the same; nothing can take the place of that gaping hole where something once stood." _

_His breath poured onto me, radiating bourbon. _

_The kitchen light bulb flickered over our heads as he put his hand over mine. To watch it was kind of like seeing paint burst onto canvas, filling everything with color. His hand swallowed mine and all I could feel was his palm , pulsing warm and wet onto my skin. My nerves dissolved—the sweat alone drowned them—and I forgot my pain for a minute._

_Then, slowly, he licked his lips and spread our fingers apart. _

_He began tracing an imaginary pattern with the knife. He murmured something to himself. The knife lifted from its place on the table, and set down in the spaces in between our fingers. Slow. He needed to be slow. That's the way it always started. Slowly. One two three. One two three—_

"_Tim—" I wanted out. I wanted out. But I was locked in. I was too scared to move. There's nothing scarier than your brother. He's right next to you, breathing down your neck...he knows all the right places. He's too close, I mean. Another guy on the street might whip you with a bicycle chain, or slice you up with some brass knuckles, or shoot you in the alley with a heater, but your brother—he knows where all the monsters in your closet are. He knows them by name. And he knows how to make it look real good and silent._

_I would have twitched had the rhythm not gotten faster. His hand tightened. The knife was hitting the table so hard it was leaving pockmarks on the table. I thought about closing my eyes but didn't, since I knew from cold hard experience that he'd laugh bloody murder to wake me up._

_Tim had that look on his face—he looked happy. His smile focused and grim, his eyes hard and sparkling: he looked like that whenever we were in the greatest danger. Nothing ever happened unless one of us nearly lost our lives doing it._

"_You know what we need, Curl? You know what we all need a little more of if we're gonna stay alive on this fucking foxhole of a planet?"_

_We were at the full beat now of five or six. I don't think—I didn't think—I saw the knife...just a flash of silver-white in the air, like a bird, bang, bang, bang against the wood, invisible craters popping up on the table everywhere._

_For a minute, I thought Tim was laughing. _

_Then the knife stood out of the wood again, trembling from the hilt just inches away from my hand. He lifted his hand off mine. I didn't notice—I should have noticed—the way his hand started trembling, too, but my eyes were swimming, so everything was trembling. Even the kitchen light, and the flies tapping on the screen door outside. I wanted to scream, or collapse, or do something. Get me outta here. I should have seen it—I should have reminded myself that the kid was human, too. But I'm always too late._

"_We need to trust each other."_

* * *

><p>Angie kept bugging Tim at dinner. It was the best time to do it—that way he couldn't slug you with an arm full of dishes.<p>

"Who's gonna be there?" he said.

"Umm,"—she looked surprised; Tim never asked who we ran with—"you know: me, Mark, M&M—"

She rattled off a whole list of names before he stopped her. "No Bryon?"

She blinked.

"Then you're not going," he said.

"What? Why _not?_"

"Bryon's probably the one who's got the most sense in his head."

I could understand Tim's qualms about letting our sister go anywhere. He was probably remembering the most recent fiasco—that time she got drunk, passed out, and had her hair cut short at that party, by Mark, of all people—because she cried for two weeks after that. Another time, she almost secretly married some hood because she was smashed, again, and thought she was pregnant by him. Luckily, she wasn't. But Tim almost had a brain hemorrhage when he found out.

"So you're not letting me go just because one_ 'sensible'_ person's not there? That's not fair!"

"Life is one big fat middle finger, sweetheart," Tim said, getting up to collect the dishes. "You learn to get used to it real quick, or not at all."

"Yeah, but _he'll_ never get used to it because you give him all the breaks," she said sourly, putting her hands on her hips while giving me the once-over. I grinned, then gave her a jolly old Life-finger. She balked and hit me in the arm. I would have laughed at her if her claws weren't so damn long.

"Think about it, Ang. I wouldn't load you down if I didn't think you couldn't handle it," Tim said. A hiss poured out of the rusty faucet as he twisted the knobs. "The only thing I can depend on Curly for is the next five hundred I'll need to work overtime to bail his ass out with."

I flashed a thumbs-up. "I am what I am and I do what I can."

Tim shot me a look. The dishes started banging around a bit rougher in the sink. "And who're you runnin' around with tonight, little boy?"

I grunted.

"The McLaughlin boys."

"No," I said cheerfully, kicking the chair leg that was always coming loose back in. "The McLaughlin Ass-Fucks."

"Have fun with that," he said. "Baby-Ass-Fuck."

"Hardy-har-har." 

* * *

><p>Man.<p>

Smoke everywhere. Girls jumping off tables.

_Man_, I thought as I took another shot. Tim's parties were pussies compared to this monster.

Okay, so I'll admit it—we were outside on the porch looking in. What? Wasn't our fucking fault everyone else pushed us outside. Dennis swore up a storm because someone upstairs was banging "Rock Me" on the Fender Stratocaster guitar he spent half his paycheck working nights at Merril's on. Dean, meanwhile, took matters into his own hands; he took up a steel baseball bat lying on the front lawn, and whenever the people inside got too loud, he'd smash the windows in. Two-Bit sat on the porch swing wedged between Tom and Bennie with a Coors glued to his hand. I smiled, wishing I had a fucking Kodak. Bleary-eyed motherfuckers.

We were like a gang-bang. We all took turns bugging Two-Bit about Kathy. Tom was the king. He practically rode the guy's back all night long, saying how he was gonna hafta become a big working man now, with a dog and 2.5 kids with blond hair and a picket fence and a swing-set and rhododendrons growing all over the place—

Two-Bit punched him square in the balls for the seventeenth time. But Tom was so sloshed he couldn't feel the pain. "Hey, here's a new idea, Tommy: how 'bout you fuck off?" he barked. "So she's knocked up. Least I know my parts are in working order. How're yours, Mr. Clap?"

We all took a step back from Tom.

Tom sniffed, shrugged, and keeled over. Bennie sighed, and kicked his feet up on him like a stool.

Dennis affectionately slapped Two-Bit on the back as he went up to get another Coors. "Why you come here, Shepard? Timmy finally run you outta town?"

"Nope—good booze is all the reason I need," I said.

I turned and smashed the shot glass against the wall.

"Hey, Deanie-boy!" Dennis hissed, seizing his brother by the collar. "You gonna take that from Shirley Shepard over there?"

Dean shrugged. "Ain't my house, man. These two stiffs who call themselves my parents pay the fucking mortgage every month."

He swung the baseball bat into another window and we all pissed in our pants laughing. 

* * *

><p>"Let's play a game," Bennie said after a while.<p>

_Okay._ We shrugged. _Okay._ It's kinda boring listening to people havin' a rip-roarin' good time when you're freezing your ass off on the front porch.

At first we thought it was a bottle of Daniels he had wrapped in a paper bag and stuck in his pocket, but it wasn't.

Tom lifted an eyebrow. "Where'd you get that?"

"Don't worry about it," Bennie said, shaking his head. "We're gonna play a game."

We all looked at each other.

"We don't play that here, Bennie," Dennis said.

But Bennie kept shaking his head. "No, not that. In that game, you get five chances to win." He spun it until it clicked. The guys' eyes narrowed. My gut began burning...heat. Go, it told me. I should have never came here. You still got time, Shepard. Go. Go. Go. _Go—_

"There's only one way you win this game," Bennie said.

He turned around and shot Tom Blackwell in the head.

It was...too clean. I'll never forget how time seemed to stand still as Tom crumpled to the earth with nothing but a _pffft _and a black little beechnut gleaming in the center of his forehead.

We scattered as he spit fire. I knew enough to duck behind whatever gave you cover, so long as you didn't get hit with shrapnel. Sometimes that stuff was worse than the bullets themselves.

The people inside the house screamed: "_Oh my God, somebody's got a gun!_" and they all started pouring outside. I think I saw the "Rock Me" kid jump out the window with Dennis' guitar still strapped to his back.

I remember how Dean, Dennis, and Two-Bit found Dean's big red Corvette—his pride, his baby, his joy—and flipped it over. Thunder sounded as the side windows shattered. More bullets flew over our heads. Blood started running down my chin—I bit my own tongue.

Someone swore at me from the distance.

Tim was driving towards me—full speed—apparently wanting to know what the hell was going on. I screamed for him to get down, but Bennie heard me and a bullet split the windshield.

I got as low as I could and ran over to the car. People started swarming in when they heard the screech of Tim's tires whipping the pavement. People from the DX down the street reached us first, and everybody started screaming at once about what to do. Then people from Merril's surrounded us. In a matter of moments over twenty people had gone outside and were running amok. This seemed to aggravate Bennie even more, who became trigger happy and started shooting everywhere.

I ducked around Tim's car, patting the sides like a blind man. I opened the door and both Angie and Tim spilled out. Oh God. Why'd he have to drag her along?

"Timmy," I hissed. "Tim. Wake up. Are you okay?" I nodded towards Angie. "Is she okay?"

"Think so," Tim said, coughing a little. "Just got—"

More screams. Two-Bit jumped on top of Bennie, wrestling him for possession of the gun. He kept twisting his arm in a lethal game of deadlock, and girls were screeching _For God's sake, somebody help him!_

The report clapped the air as loud as thunder.

Time stood still again. Two-Bit looked down at his chest, murmured something, then fell flat onto the ground.

Two of the Curtis brothers were in the middle of the crowd when that happened—they let out the battle cry. Then everybody and their brother jumped on top of Bennie: me, Tim, Darrel, Dally, Dean, Dennis, Soda, Steve, a few guys from the DX, some kids working at Merril's, and even some guys from gang of spics who had been watching from the ghetto. But Bennie didn't care. He kept shooting into the crowd at random. Some of them grabbed a hold of his flailing legs, some his arms, and I think Soda got a hold of the gun. Some of them wouldn't stop whaling on him. Steve seized the barrel from Soda and smashed it into Bennie's nose so many times he almost broke his own hand doing it. It took three big guys to come and pull him off.

Bennie went limp in under two minutes. 

* * *

><p>No one was certain about anything after that, except for two things<strong>: <strong>Tom was dead and Two-Bit wasn't moving.

Everybody stood still after the dust settled, breathing and sweating and saying nothing for forever, unsure if Bennie would get up like some freaky undead puppet and start shooting again.

It didn't take long for the fuzz to show. Some girl had freaked and called them. Everybody screamed for an ambulance. I just stood in the middle of the street where I had been twenty minutes before. I didn't feel sad, but tears started leaking out of my eyes. I sniffed sharply and brushed them off. I was maybe glad I was alive. I don't know. But just smelling the blood and smoke on the ground reminded me of some other time, a long time ago, when someone else I knew tried something stupid.

Steve used Soda as a crutch. He closed his eyes to keep from staring at Two-Bit as they put him up. Darry sat on the front porch, his eyes drawn tight and his head in between his knees. He didn't even notice the giant welling purple stain on his pant leg. Soda held it together, and Dally was stony-faced.

They all looked close to popping.

"Somebody's gotta go tell Kathy," Soda said quietly. He tapped on Steve's back, ushering him home. But Steve put his face in his broken hands...and his shoulders pulsed. "Come on." 

* * *

><p>It wasn't good for any of us. My injuries were mild compared to some other people's—I had fractured my hand in two places, long twin scars that ran down the length of my hand, looking like you had just stuck a steak fork in there.<p>

Tim and Darry had been standing in the same place when everybody ganged up on Bennie. The minute people dog-piled him, he got startled and shot at the ground near them, so the both of them had to have a few pieces of shrapnel removed from their calves.

Dean's nose bled something fierce; Steve almost broke his own hand. Dallas had been struck in a nerve at the bend of his elbow, and from that point on had a slight twitch in his hand he could never fully rest.

"Curly," Dally yelled. "Get over here!"

"What?"

"It's your brother."

_No—_I thought, my heart pounding. _Not now._

Tim laid on the pavement.

Angie's head snapped up. She was covered in the pool of blood that welled up from his leg. "He's not moving," she said. "He's not—"

_Come on, Tim, fight it, fight it—don't let the bitch win!_

* * *

><p>"<em>Tim!<em>" was the next thing I remember screaming as my palms slammed against his chest. "_Dammit!_"

He turned and threw up on the concrete. He looked like a ghost having a nightmare—his eyes hollowed out and his hands twisted at odd angles. He writhed up into himself so tight he was shrinking.

"What's happening to him?" someone said.

Dally turned and swore at me.

I think I— 

* * *

><p>When I woke up, I was sitting beside Tim inside an ambulance. I leaned my head back against the wall. Winston saved our asses again. I guess we did need him for something other than being our punching bag.<p>

I think—I had a concussion. No. That didn't feel right. I don't know. I was drunk. Was that it? No—sometimes I got so smashed I couldn't see, but never to the point of blacking out.

My head swam. I don't remember anything, but Angie would tell me later that I kept hitting Tim in the chest, trying to get him to breathe. I didn't know it, but I was making big red bruises where I hit him, so Dally had to knock me out to keep from hurting him any more.

Tim had IVs running up and down his arm.

I don't remember saying his name.

I must have. His eyelids fluttered open.

"You're gettin' to be a hard hitter, " he said, trying to smirk. "You shoulda just left me there, you little punk-ass."

I sniffed. That cabin was cold. We jolted a little as the driver hit another pothole. I couldn't help but see how huge his scar looked in the light, running down the length of his face, long and white and raised like a hilltop down his cheek—or maybe that was because he was pale, and his eyes huge and unfocused, swallowing the rest of his face. All eyes, but...there was no blue to them—just two black pools staring at the ceiling.

I could see my reflection in them.

"I tell you what to do," I said. "You ain't getting under the ground till I'm dead and cold myself." 

* * *

><p>Five hours later and it was quarter after two in the morning. We sat around in the waiting room, trying our damnedest not to kill each other. Wasn't really much we could say—nothing we said could dodge the elephant in the room. So I tapped my bandaged hand against the armrest, stared at a big bronze cross bolted to the wall, and opened my mouth.<p>

"Bennie," I said.

"Bennie," Dally said. He glanced down, shook his head, and cursed at his arm. He told the EMP he'd make the joker wear his own cast if he came toward him with that thing. So it's his own goddamn fault if he's still bitchin'.

"Who would have thought?" I said. _Always the quiet ones_, I thought. But my mind flashed to the way he laughed, like a hyena—not a right laugh—not a good laugh—

I shuddered a little. They better wind that straight jacket tight.

"Don't know," he said, then smiled a grim smile. "Bennie—god damn. Didn't think there was enough balls in that kid to pull somethin' like that off."

Angie wasn't paying attention. She kept studying her reflection in the floor. "Tim's windshield got busted," she murmured.

I said nothing.

"He'll have to talk to the insurance people tomorrow. Or maybe the next day. I don't know. Whenever. The bitch got him pretty bad today."

Dally said: "Uh-huh."

"Dally," she said tiredly. I looked up. We all looked like hell. Dally's face was tight and flushed. I had blood coming out of my nose. My hand had swelled and it pretty much swallowed the armrest in a giant mass of purple. Angie's hair hung in clumps of black against her forehead. "Go home. Clean yourself up...dirty fucking _moron_."

He smirked, flipping her off. "Fuck-ass cunt, think you can go around tellin' me what to do? You go home and wash that ugly grease-trap out with soap."

She smashed her mouth into his.

I turned away. I didn't do anything. I was too tired. Any other time I'd have Winston running back home to his mama; any other time I'd chain Angie to the top of the car and drive off. But I didn't feel like it, at least, not tonight. All I wanted was to find something like a bed and fall into it. And my head ached, too. How many shots did I put down? God damn. Everything was a fuckin' aquarium now.

"Ang," I said, pointing to the car.

Winston looked like somebody punched him in the yaw. He stalked off, cussing more than I'd ever heard him cuss. Who woulda guessed? That was all you needed to do to get 'im to roll over. I'll admit, Angie's got some balls—I wasn't exactly itchin' to go diggin' around in that trash can.

"The doctors came in already. Said they'd keep him overnight," I said.

"All right," she said, running a hand through her hair."And sorry about that—I hadda shut him up somehow."

I looked at her. Her hair was a mess, and she was dirty and bloody, and her eyes were bright and blue.

Just like Mom's.

My jaws clicked.

"Yeah," I said.

We got in the car and said nothing for a long time.

Then I lit up a weed, snapped the lighter shut, and said: "We need to go for a ride." 

* * *

><p>I killed the engine at the depot.<p>

"Why'd Tim take you with him?" I said. "You ain't little anymore."

She smiled at the top of her left shoe. A long while passed before she said anything. "Guess I am. Got caught busting out."

I licked my lips as an eight-mile coal train headed for Oklahoma City passed by. "Where were you gonna go? To the party?"

"No, I—" she smiled at her shoe again, defeated. "Anyplace that goes."

My stomach lurched.

"You—" I spat. I gripped the steering wheel and clenched my teeth. She can't be doing this now. Oh, no, she wasn't gonna pull this one. Not if I had anything to say about it. "—_bitch._"

She shot me a look as hard as steel.

I stopped.

Then I realized something.

"Angel," I whispered. I sighed and let some smoke out my nostrils. "God."

Her eyes softened.

"Tell me you're not."

She kept staring at me.

"Please," I said, my voice rising. An ice pick was forming at the bottom of my throat. My voice cracked, and I gripped the steering wheel even harder. "Please tell me you're not."

Her eyes were huge beneath the streetlights. "What do you want me to say?"

"Say no," I said.

She said nothing.

"No," she said finally. I put my head in my hands and leaned forward on the steering wheel, squeezing my eyes shut, focusing hard. This can't be happening, this can't be...not after all we've been through. We've worked too hard to keep it together. My head swam; I saw his eyes...all black and no blue.

_Tim's worked too damn hard_, I thought. _Don't kill him, Angie, please—don't kill him like that._

My hands got wet.

"I'm not little old Angel anymore," she said, sighing. "I won't end up like Kathy, I promise. I know better than she does."

Yeah, I thought with my head wet in my hands, that's what all the little old Angels in the world say to their brothers. But the thing is, not all of them have brothers who'll whip them the first chance they get to stick their head in the shark tank.

She said: "You scare me when you're like this."

I looked up.

"Promise me you'll stay away from Winston," I said.

She shook her head softly, smiling. Her eyes glistened. "Don't you know anything, stupid? I don't make promises I can't keep."

I think she must've seen the look on my face, because she reached across to put her arms around my neck. Damn it—damn it _all_—tears started leaking out of my eyes again. My knuckles turned white pressing into the steering wheel. I was madder than hell. And I was alone.

Alone. The thought hit me like a ton of bricks. _Alone_—she and Tim both, they were both going to leave me alone, just like Mom and Dad did—when I needed them the most.

And somewhere in the dark Tim's voice rang out.

"_We need to trust each other."_

* * *

><p><em>To be continued.<em>


	5. Chapter 5

I almost ripped my copy of _Romeo & Juliet_ in half. There was no fucking way we were gonna finish three acts in two days. Ms. Greton must've been on a killer acid trip or something. Fuck-ass Brits, always thinkin' they're smarter than us American white trash. Least all our teeth are in a fucking straight row. Damn.

I took a bottle of Coke from the icebox and read aloud: "_Tis torture, and not mercy. Heaven is here  
>where Juliet lives, and every cat and dog and little mouse, every unworthy thing, live here in heaven and may look on her, but Romeo may not.<em>" I looked up. "What in the bejambles is that supposed to mean?"

"Theater class?" Angie groaned, throwing her book on the couch. "They should call it _I Have No Fucking Clue What You're Saying, You Dead English Son-of-a-Bitch_."

I glanced up. She had a gold book thrown across her lap. "What's that?"

"The next book we're gonna be reading," she said, tossing it down. "I figured we'd missed a lot of time already, so if we got a jump start on the next project, we might not have as much catching-up to do."

"Fine by me," I said, shrugging. I flicked my Coke cap on the floor and swilled it down. I didn't really give two damns about it. Was gonna flunk the fucking class anyway. "What's it called?"

"_Othello._"

"What kinda name's that?" I snorted, snatching the book away. "Who wrote this gem?"

"Shakespeare."

My head hit the table with a definite crack.

Tim came into the room. "Angie," he said, his voice low. I jumped a little. I didn't even realize he had gone down the stairs. "The cops talk to you yet?"

"I'm all talked out," Angie said. "Curly knows more about what happened."

"That's not what I meant," he said.

They stared at each other, and for the first time in my life, I felt like something between them was melting. I didn't know what it was. But it wasn't right...it was like an electrical wire slowly melting...dripping...hissing.

Tim looked the way he did the day he showed me the steak knife.

"But you don't know the whole story," she said, talking too fast. "If you knew the whole thing—if you'd let me just say what it really is—"

"I'd like to think I know enough about what my sister goes around doing, but the truth is, I don't," he said. His eyes sank into the table as hard blue pieces of stone. "And I'm sorry. I'd like to think she's not a little seventeen year-old candy-girl with her head shoved all the way up her rainbow ass, but unfortunately, I can't always let what I'd like to think mess with what I know. That's not how the world works. I do the best that I can, and maybe that's not enough for you. Fine. You say you're old enough to know what's best? Fine. You're an adult now, and I don't give a fuck about you. So go. Go, and you'll see pretty quick that the world's not so pretty and wonderful a place you think it is. You'll see even quicker he's not the white knight you always imagined him. But you're old enough now, so what do I know?"

"Tim—"

"He's outside right now. I heard him pull in this morning. He's still there, isn't he?"

"_Tim—_"

He slammed the screen door behind him.

* * *

><p>Tim walked up to Dallas, who was standing beside his car. No one said anything for five minutes. They simply stared at each other. They always had a way of communicating that no one else ever seemed to pick up on. Like two radio transmission towers. No words...just one wavelength. All they needed to do was stand there and stare each other down. They were the same height squaring off, breathing on each other. You could see their breath rise in the morning fog. Blank. Pale.<p>

Then Dally smiled, tilted his head, and said: "You sayin' I'm the reason?"

"Ain't sayin' nothin' you ain't," Tim said.

"That's not much, Tim."

"I'm flattered you think so."

They stared at each other again.

"Get the hell off," Tim said finally. "And get the hell away from us."

Dallas snarled, his teeth glittering.

"You get _the hell off my_—"

He stormed inside. When he came back out he threw a chair into the yard, busting it into four pieces.

Winston's eyes blazed. I knew he could rip my brother apart if he wanted to—if Tim just pushed him a little bit more, he would kill him.

A chill shot down my spine. Friends—so much for them. Look at how they get strong. They feed off your weaknesses. Like vultures, just waiting for you to fall. They were the ones holding the knife closest to your throat. You said the wrong thing, and they obliged.

I swallowed a hard, hot rock in my throat and tried not to think. _Et tu, Brutae?_

The minute Dallas closes his fist is the minute he and Tim break. No one pulled their punches around here anymore, but they—there was something kind of honorable about them. Not the shining star kind of honorable, just the kind that you knew they weren't gonna go early, or stab you in the back when you weren't looking. No. They wanted to fight, they looked you right in the eye and gave you your money's worth.

When I opened my eyes, Angie was standing in front of Dally, blocking Tim.

Their eyes bored into each other.

"If you want to hit my brother, you have to hit me first," she said.

Dally laughed, squinted at the sunrise, looked down, and asked her if she was kidding him. If she was _fucking _kidding him.

"Hitting him's the same thing as hitting me," she said quietly. "You hit him, you make him suffer, fine. You hit me twice as hard." She spread her arms wide open. "I'm all yours."

He looked at her. Something snapped between them. I knew that much because Angie had this look in her eyes like she was falling...like Dally had been a cliff she had chained herself to...and now she was plummeting.

The wind blew.

"This is all I get," Dally whispered. "All I ever fucking _got._"

He pushed the hair out of his face. Then he turned and slammed his fist into Tim's busted windshield.

* * *

><p>I'd hate to be a woman. You have to be tough when no one even knows you're tough. I mean, guys strut around like they're the toughest shit on two legs. Women <em>are<em> the toughest shit on two legs. And the thing is, the cunts don't even need to open their mouths to utter a single word. Don't even need to pull a punch. They just go out and take all of life's shit. No bitching allowed. That's tough.

And Kathy Johnson's gotta be the toughest broad I've ever seen. Short, real little girl, blond-haired, blue-eyed, but her stomach was as swollen as a beach ball. Looked like she'd almost topple over when she walked. Her parents had kicked her out when they heard, so she had been living with Two-Bit and his mom for a while. She kept quiet. Never asked help from nobody.

Steve had cried. Sodapop had cried. Ponyboy had cried. Even Dallas had a stormy look to him. But Kathy Johnson was seven months pregnant with his son, and she didn't shed a single tear the day Two-Bit died. She just sat by his side, talking when he wanted to talk, staying still when he wanted to be silent.

She found his hand. When he felt it, he gripped it tight, and didn't let go.

She said: "I hope I didn't cause you too much trouble."

"Shoot," Two-Bit said, grinning from beneath his closed eyelids, "never had that much fun in my life. Look—lookit—crazy Bennie gave me this tuff scar on my chest. Nah, babe, nah, don't cry. He can't kill off your old Two-Bit, your old Two-Bit's fucking Superman. He can deflect bullets, see? Big kaboom, y'dig? Yeah...you dig good." He trailed off for a minute. "Think they'll be writin' headliners about me yet?"

Kathy smiled. "Yeah."

"Kathy," he said as his grin faded. He was silent for a while in the hum of the heart monitor. "Kathy."

She bent to the side to kiss his hand. He seemed to stir.

"I saw the baby, Kath," he said, almost whispering. "Blond boy...shorty, just like you...your eyes in my face. Said his name's Nate." He opened his eyes slowly, heavily. "You like that name?"

Kathy looked down and said Yes, she did.

"I'm glad," Two-Bit said. "I'm real glad."

And his grip loosened.

* * *

><p>The next few days were a flurry of cops, reporters, doctors... you know, the usual people we leave to pick up the shattered pieces of ourselves.<p>

Angie had been gone since yesterday. She snapped. She went to bed, slipped out, and didn't come back. She left no note. Nothing. Tim didn't say anything to me. He sauntered up the stairs, slow and heavy, and he locked himself in his room. So I was alone today.

I don't know why, but I decided to go see Bennie.

His parents took it awful hard. Turns out he's been addicted to acid for a while and they didn't want anyone to know. It fucked him up bad. He started taking hard stuff and drinking because he didn't want to face the fact that he had to go to Nam. He got real bad real fast. He kept telling them he'd drive off a cliff, or hang himself in the closet, or smash himself into a tree, so they were always on the alert for suicide signs. But not—not anything like this. He was a good kid, they said, and he wouldn't have done what he did if he knew what he was doing. They decided to plead insanity for all of his charges.

When I walked into the room, the first thing I noticed was deathly silence. No place should ever be that silent. But it was. Walking in, I felt like I knew what death sounded like. Just like that silence—all around you, everywhere, inside every pore, inside every crack in the floor, inside your ears, soaking everything, flooding everything—like a tunnel, swallowing everything until nothing's left.

Bennie laid on the bed staring up, looking broken. The light was too white, too clean, and settled in every crack on his face, aging him by a hundred years. His unblinking eyes sank into his face. They had a million detox IVs shoved in his veins and down his throat, and his skin had a yellow ashen color. When he breathed, he kind of gasped, like a fish out of water, slowly, silently choking on himself. His eyes reminded me of Tim's—wide pools of shining black.

The doctors said he would never speak again.

* * *

><p>I was surprised to round the corner and find Darry.<p>

"Hello," he said, too blankly, before I could even open my gaping yaw. "Where's your sister?"

I blinked. "Ang—Angela snuck out of the house yesterday," I said.

I didn't want to think about her. Not now. Angie, you idiot, I thought. You fucking _idiot_. You wanted everything too hard, too full, too fast. You just couldn't wait for tomorrow to come.

He nodded.

"Um—how's Ponyboy taking it?" I said.

"Why?"

"I've only been seeing Johnny at school lately." Even he didn't look too good. White as the inside of a fish's belly.

"Johnny's a good kid," Darry said.

"Darrel," I said.

He stared at the floor.

"They took them away," he said.

The wheels of a nearby cart clicked.

_God._

"When?" I said.

"Last Saturday."

Today was Thursday. The party had been two Fridays ago. Two-Bit died just last Saturday. Pony and Soda got carted last Saturday, too... That wasn't—no—it couldn't have been because they thought—

"I broke," he said, his face twisting and white. I hadn't seen him like that since he sat on the porch with his head in his knees and his leg turning purple. "I broke. They just came in. Pony and Soda—kept screaming for me. I tried talking to them, but they just wouldn't listen. So I ran out to the street as they were pulling away, and I...started beating on the windows with a baseball bat."

He didn't say any more. I didn't especially like Darry, but I understood. I did. His brothers meant everything to him. If they ever tried to take Angie away like that, I would have blasted the driver right between the eyes with a .45 and not even blink.

He looked up. His face had aged years in two weeks. I didn't like it—he had the slow, dying look of someone who had nothing left and too much time to have it.

"Did it ever occur to you," he said, breathing softly, "that somehow, we might all be sick inside?"

* * *

><p>The phone rang. It woke me up from the haze of a sleep I'd been in trying to read the play by myself. I wiped my mouth off, glancing at the clock in the kitchen. Quarter to three. <em>This better be a goddamn telemarketer. Otherwise I'm gonna plunge my hand into the telephone and smack the insomniac motherfucker straight through the receiver<em>, I thought.

I blinked as I heard myself think that part. I blamed Tim—if he came down just once, I wouldn't have busied myself watching a goddamn _Looney Tunes_ marathon all day.

"Alright! Lordy," I groaned as I picked up the telephone. "Hello?"

"Curly," she said.

"Angela," I said.

No one said anything. Just like Tim and Dally had.

"Curly, I—"

"I know what you're going to say," I said, "and I don't want to hear it."

I turned to hang up when I heard her burst into tears. Now, I've never heard Angie cry, even when she was a little kid and sobbing her guts out in my shirt. She never made any sounds. But now—it sounded like a sharp wail. I would have hung up if I didn't hear it.

It sounded like she said_ I need you._

"What now?" I hissed. "You want your fucking mommy?"

"No...can you..." It sounded like she was swallowing. Her voice was getting thin, watery. "...can you get to Adams Street?"

I could, but—what was she doing there? Adams Street divided the East and West Side.

I said: "Why?"

"Curly," she said. Her voice quivered. "Please. Just...can you just come over here?"

"What's wrong?"

"I—I think—" she started crying again. This time loud and desperate. My blood pounded in my ears. Something was wrong—very, very wrong. "I'm sorry—I'm just scared—"

"Why're you scared? What's wrong? Dammit, Ang, talk to me here!"

"I think—I don't know...no one's here, I mean—I don't see no one, but I..." Her voice faded before the receiver clicked. "... I think someone shot me."

* * *

><p><em>To be continued.<em>


	6. Chapter 6

_A/N: Warning: intensity shall max in the next few chapters. Please remember to fasten your seat belt—we shall be experiencing some turbulence...XD_

_TaylorPaige: You ish so aweshome, mah friend! I love your reviews! Cookies for jou! =D_

_NaiveLove and outsidersdallaslover: Mah friends! Thank jou—jou are too kind! Cookies! =D_

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* * *

><p>I bounded outside and swore at the black empty patch of driveway.<p>

Then I turned around, and noticed the endless trail of headlights piercing the road.

So I went for the next best thing—I ran out into the middle of the road. I didn't think—I had no thoughts, no feelings, no nothing—I just kind of jerked, letting my body do what it was going to do, and a second later I was out in the middle of the road.

Never played reverse chicken before, I thought.

A black Lincoln Continental screeched to a halt about three inches in front of me. My heart thudded as the hood bucked into me somewhat, and my knees crouched lower, apparently preparing myself to get hit head-on. I staggered a little bit, then put my palms on the grill and pushed it back. The engine hummed as other cars whipped by. People started laying their horns on.

Dennis stuck his head out the window. He and Dean always played mailbox baseball on Thursday night, when Mom and Pop were home and they couldn't wreak their usual window-smashing havoc. "_What the hell are you doing? I coulda killed you back there!_" Then he spat his cigarette butt onto the street. His face looked twice as ugly inside the white of burning headlights.

"You're gonna take me to Adams Street," I said.

Dammit—now Dumbass Dean decided to run his yaw. "Adams Street? Adams _Street__?_ Fuck it, kid, it's two-thirty in the fucking morning! First you jump in front of our car, and now you wanna go out to the middle of fucking _no man's land?_"

I ran up to shotgun, ripped the door open, threw Dean out, and jumped in. His Siamese twin stared at me, his eyes wide and dumb and blank, and his nostrils were flaring. I flicked out my blade and pointed it at the middle of his Adam's apple before he could lunge for me.

"No more bitchin'," I said, keeping my voice low so I only had to warn him once. "You're gonna take me to Adams Street."

He swallowed, his eyes hard on my face.

I pressed.

"_Now."_

And we were off.

* * *

><p>It seemed like the road was stretching—the farther we got, the farther we had to go. Seems creepy, I know, but it's been known to do that.<p>

Adams Street is called _no-man's land, _and for good reason. Nobody in their right mind goes there. Why in the hell Angie was there, I didn't know. She could be scatterbrained sometimes, but even she knew better. That's the first thing they teach you. _Welcome to Tulsa. Stay the fuck away from Adams Street. Please watch your step. Stay the fuck away from Adams Street. We have a population of 300,000. Stay the fuck away from Adams Street. We hope you'll enjoy your stay. Stay the fuck away from Adams Street._

If you wanna have a rumble, you go to an open space—like the park or the football field or the impound lot—and you slug it out. If you wanna have warfare, you drag your sorry ass to Adams Street and scream _Good-bye, cruel fucking world! _

'Cause the last time somebody had warfare, it killed half the block.

Jim Jones. If you live on the East Side, you better know your legends. Jim Jones and his gang—the ones who formed the Tiber Street Tigers—were the most famous East Side fuckers who ever lived. And I mean these motherfuckers were the genuine brand, eat-nails-for-breakfast kinda _tough_. The Socs in those days were pretty fucking tough, too, not like those British Invasion pansies you see walkin' round with the Beatles haircuts nowadays. No—old generation Socs were the real shit, the true thugs who gave you a good run for ya money. Those were the times when they had real fighters...hell, when they had real _fights._ You wanted to dance with any one of 'em—grease or Soc—you might as well have been wanted by the state.

There was only one place where no one claimed any territory—an ancient barn sitting on an old intersection nobody bothered to shut down. Nobody around here knows whose barn that was. And the people who did know either kicked the bucket or won't never tell. Well—it don't matter anyway; a couple of years ago, some freak lightning came down and took it right out. Boom. Gone.

That ancient barn had been the original no man's land, a place where they held war councils and stuff like that. After the lightning came, they passed a new unspoken rule—no man's land now extended along the entire length of Adams Street, starting at the bend shooting off towards Tiber.

There had been, before someone knocked it down, a hang-out called _The Zodiac. _It rested just barely—about twenty feet going in—on greaser territory. Right behind_ The Zodiac's_ parking lot, the Socy side of Adams met west Tiber Street.

Jimmy Jones lived there. He and his buddies got jumped in their own territory every single day after school. And, I mean, those guys didn't take shit from nobody—they broke their brothers' noses clean off if they looked at 'em funny. They got real tough real fast. They started fighting back, but the Socs only shrugged it off and got more guys. (Marking the early beginnings of the Socs' carpool fetish.) One day, after getting his bottom tooth knocked out with a busted pipe, Jimmy got tired of it. And then that was _it._

People always said he had been a hypnotic kinda guy. Somethin' about him made you wanna follow him around to see what he'd do next. I think, maybe, it was somethin' in his voice—the minute he opened his mouth, everybody stopped to listen to him. He made himself leader of the Tigers, and the first thing he said was that they needed to get their act together. So the greasers on Tiber Street decided to play it smart and switch to a system where everybody knew their places. It wasn't every man for himself anymore. Suddenly, you had hoods coming in and whuppin' your ass for breathing on that_ buddy_ they had jumped just a week ago.

All of them painted the word _Tigers_ on the side of their cars in big red letters. Some drove choppers bearing the name. Pride of the East Side, we always say. Those were our fuckin' forefathers right there. They wore hair grease and T-shirts, steel-toe boots and aviator sunglasses, black leather jackets and cigarette butts. They were dirty, grinning, and proud, and they didn't give a damn about nothing. Their girls slid off their faces just kissing 'em.

The first thing on their hit list? Wipe the Socs clear from town.

Jimmy had arranged everything at no man's land—well, him and the Socy version of him: Henry Fuckin'-Rockefeller-Something-or-Other. Rich snobby kid. Never wiped his own ass in his life. Anyway, they met up. They slugged it out. They drew up a pact.

_No weapons. _

The next day, everybody came with his brother: the Tigers in their T-Birds, the Socs in their Corvairs. They all lined up along the edge of Adams Street. Jimmy made his boys make a large but packed semicircle so they could better one-up the kids who were pouring out in droves on the sidewalk.

Before it all began, Tulsa was deathly silent.

Then, in the middle of the silence, a blond-haired Soc flicked a blade at Andy—the first greaser to kick the bucket; he was almost as famous as old Jimmy, called _Airhead Andy_—who'd been snarling at him.

Andy ran across the street and lunged at the Soc with his own blade.

Everybody exploded.

The cashier at _The Dingo_, Ed Feynman, had been best buddies with Jimmy. He has a glass eye. Go up to the counter sometime and ask him about the rumble of '52. I swear, it's like a reflex to him now—you say those three words and he turns around and belts you without saying a word. But you can't blame him. Everybody who had been there took an oath of silence—old greasers and old Socs alike—like they had been in the Mafia or Nam instead of a rumble. Yet this same guy goes outside, folds out his lawn chair, pops his Coke bottle open, and bellows at the Soc-pansies to swing at us a little harder_._

The minute the police took over, all hell broke loose. That's why the fuzz are so obsessed with breaking up every little tiff we have now, because during that rumble, there had been a body count. I ain't shitting you. A _body_ _count._ There's a story that goes around sometimes that one teeny-bopper, Lucy Sampson, had been chasing her dog down the street because it heard all the commotion and freaked out. As she rounded Tiber Street, she ran right into the middle of the fray and got trampled on. She walks with a limp now. Yeah—full fucking _body count._ Took the city days to clean up the blood—blood that, back then, they let build up without any healthy bop-action. Blood that spilled right over the rim.

Twenty Socs, fifteen greasers. Two cops were stabbed. Jim Jones also died; he wasn't even eighteen yet.

But he didn't go down quietly. As he lay in a pool of blood—his broken ribs having turned inward and punctured his lungs in three places—he seized some Soc who had been stepping over him, pulled him down by the sleeve of his polo shirt, and split his face down the middle with the flat end of a jackknife. Then, hocking up to spit on him, he choked on the blood pouring down his throat, and he died.

I forgot to add that these guys were_ insane. _And maybe that Jim Jones was also Bennie's uncle.

Nowadays, going down Adams Street is like stepping into the Twilight Zone—one solid yellow line cuts the world in two. In our half of the world you have the shanty towns, the graying houses whose roofs are falling apart and covering the barred-up windows with blankets, and where the yards are fenced in with twelve feet of chainlink, and where bottles and kids' broken toys clutter the bare brown patches of yard. Now look across the street. In _their_ half of the world, you have the fricking 11,000 square-foot chateaus scrubbed and polished and painted solid yellows and blues and reds, that have shining green paths of grass hopping along the fucking yellow brick road to their wisteria-covered stoops.

So much for inheritances.

They say you can still hear Jim Jones walk down the street. Sometimes, they say, on a quiet summer night, if you go up to the place where he died, and yell out, "Where're your Tigers?" he'll laugh and say, "Fightin' in the den."

Bull fucking _shit._

I swear, the fucking things people come up with... The fact that I feel sorry for a guy who's been dead for fourteen years is bad enough already. But these people are _idiots._

You just can't let a motherfucker rest, can you?

* * *

><p>I called her name until my voice got hoarse. The street was an eternity of nightfall and trash cans and phone booths. I used every name, each name dying on my lungs somewhere, hoping above every hope...I wasn't too late.<p>

_Angela…Angel…Angie…Ang._

_Angela…Angel…Angie…Ang._

_Angela…Angel…Angie…Ang._

"Over here," someone said from what seemed like a thousand years, and a thousand miles, later.

I looked toward the voice.

Winston.

Then I saw the red. Red all over him. Red glittering as black in the moonlight, covering everything. I recognized that color—it was the red-black of the blood that had covered Tim's room.

My stomach sank into my knees when I saw him.

_God._

He was sitting deathly still on a bench. It looked like he was covering something in his jacket; a shifting mass bulged from underneath, and moved slowly. My mind flashed briefly. I thought vaguely that the whole thing looked like childbirth. He was drenched in blood, slightly smiling that smile of pain that hurt so much his nerves shut off, sitting there with a contraction in his jacket.

I snapped back to reality. Wake up, Shepard. Things were getting clear and then becoming fuzzy again. In and out. In and out. In and—

"Hey," I said.

He almost fell over. I kept my hands on his jacket and pulled him up to steady him, wondering maybe he was drunk...  
><em><br>_"Have you seen my sister?" I said. I had to keep this straight. Nothing else mattered.

"She's right here," he said. "I kept her nice and warm for ya."

He opened his arms.

Angela was wrapped in them. She spilled out headfirst...blotted and red and twisted, breathing in smothered gasps...just like a newborn...

I caught her.

He tried to grin. "Hey."

I said: "What?"

"Old Jimmy Jones is walkin' down the street," he muttered. "He ain't lookin' too happy."

"Why?"

"He says...everybody's a fuckin' pansy nowadays, but, uh...I think he likes me. Says he wants to...go out for a drink."

"Gonna go with him?"

He shook his head, his mouth frozen in that perpetual half-smirk. "Nah. We'll never agree. I'm a pansy...he's a pussy."

Then, still half-smirking, he crumpled onto the pavement.

* * *

><p>I swore to all religions and then some as I poured Angie into the back seat. Not that I didn't want to help-I just didn't wanna look at her. Somehow, it was different with her. Like she wasn't anyone who could get hurt...she was the invincible one of us all. Which hurt even more to see her... My vision started to blur—my heart was wildfire. Her blood spilled everywhere. She was getting pale fast. And if her eyes grew huge and shiny and black, I might just pop—<p>

"Whoa, Shepard," Dennis said. "Slow down."

I looked at him.

"What's going on?"

I motioned to the heap in the back seat.

He looked down, and sniffed slightly.

"We're gonna go to the hospital," he said finally, and put the key in the ignition.

* * *

><p>I kept looking at him in the waiting room, thinking of nothing. White lights burned the air, making it hard to breathe. My lungs deflated. I thought that this must be the air Tim breathed every day. A hearty lungful of needles and ammonia. I almost wished I could stop breathing altogether.<p>

I don't know—when you got no one, you get pretty desperate for a face to show concern for you. You sometimes miss that shit.

But, hell, least I wasn't weepy like the Curtises.

Dennis put his hand on the back of my neck. I felt him squeeze it once. Maybe he was thinking about his own brother.

"You're alright, Shepard," he said, crossing his arms after a while passed by in silence. "You're alright."

"How you figure?" I said.

He smiled. It was too slow of a smile. He pitied me. And I suddenly knew what Angie had been talking about before, with Winston. I was feeling confused—I didn't know whether to laugh in his face or knock him down.

"I dunno, Shepard. Maybe I shouldn't be sayin' this, but...it's kinda nice to know that cold, hard hoods are human, too," he said, too softly, too quietly, too slowly. "'Cause even cold, hard hoods gotta have somebody to get scared half t'death for, too, you know?"

* * *

><p>I never got used to hospitals. I know, I should be more used to them than anyone else, but—I ducked out whenever I could. It's like being trapped in a giant white cage. It's too clean, and you feel like the biggest filth on the planet. They make you feel like that because you bleed, or you pop, or you have stuff oozing out of you they tell you is bad and unclean and sinful. Yeah. It's a sin to be sick. I always hated it for Tim, how the doctors always stared straight through him like he wasn't even there. He was a sinner in their eyes—but it wasn't his fault. The bitch…forever the bitch. The bitch somehow made him less in the eyes of others. I hated her with all of my being and then some. If she were a real woman, I'd…I'd be sitting in the electric chair right now. How <em>dare<em> she? How fucking dare she do this to Tim? To all of us? Didn't she realize how she pulled us all in different directions, how she kept us up night after night? What was she going to do the next day? What was she going to do for the rest of our fucking lives?

If the doctors stared through Angie the way they did Tim, I'd explode. _What the hell are you __thinking?__!_ _She's__ not a goddamn bullet! She's my sister__, she's__ hurt__, and she's__ a fucking human being__! So__ if you don't want that scalpel sticking three inches out of your fucking forehead, you're gonna get a set and__ HELP HER!_

"You okay, Shepard?" Dennis said.

I didn't look up from my head pressed against the wall.

"Curly?" he corrected.

Don't you be treatin' me like a sick animal now, you fool.

My mind kept flashing back to Dallas. He looked stiff. He fell with a flat smack against the stone, like something had just slipped out of him. It wasn't like blood; you couldn't put in more, you couldn't put it back in. You scattered those cards into the wind, no one was there to play 52 pick-up. And suddenly, being there seeing that stiff piece of shell crumble to the ground, it felt like being trapped in a wind tunnel, getting slammed around in all different directions. Weren't we all like that? Didn't we just go along with whatever life gave us, nothing asked, just going wherever it decided we should go?

Dallas had lived hard. He did. He drank, he banged up broads, he jumped kids, stole, cheated, lied, belted, had been belted, laughed in the face of flying shit. He had a record that made every other hood in this town look like Mother Teresa. But he sure looked strange that night Angie smashed her mouth against his...like he recognized something. But that ass was too proud and stubborn to say what it was.

You only get one life. Dally lived his. Now he was done. There was no more he'd ever do again. He'd never get to try it again. He was done, for now, for forever.

You only get one life. They say you should spend it following your dreams. The people who say that bullshit should get gutted. There's no such thing. There is no such fucking thing.

But, since I was thinking about it, I guess I had a dream, once, a long time ago...one I never even told Angie about. I don't even know if I want to say it now, I...

If I could, I would have become a doctor.

But there were the obvious reasons. Number One being: I wasn't smart enough. I could barely keep my eyes open in class as it was, and in medical school they make people study for days on end without even having time to shit. Number Two: my track record for keeping outta trouble wasn't so hot. There was no way they'd let a hood like me come at 'em with a pen, let alone a scalpel. Number Three: everybody would think I was some sorta soft pansy-ass. I couldn't even stand being inside a hospital. But...I mean...if there was something I could have done, just to assume some kind of control-I'd never have to stare helplessly into the huge black reflecting pools of someone's eyes ever again. I could do something about it. I could stop it. I could scratch it out, crush it under my heel, wipe it out forever. I could finally beat the bitch.

She'd never control me again.

But it's too late for me. Hell, who am I kidding? I never had a chance. Day one, I never had a chance. This was who I was. It would never change no matter what I did. Somehow, Curly the hood would loom over me every day for the rest of my life and cross out everything else-Curly the brother, Curly the son...Curly, a kid who, maybe, once upon a time, looked at the world and, maybe, just wanted something a little more.

Dammit. It was the truth, dammit, damn it all—why was my stomach still sinking? Was I actually expecting something? What do they teach you? What the _hell_ do they teach you...? You don't expect nothing and you don't get crushed. You have bubble-dreams, and they pop. You go out there, you get fucking crushed.

My stomach kept sinking. Every day that passed felt like I'd missed a train to someplace important. There was something I needed to do...but I missed it already.

I could see it in my mind. That's what scared me. I could go out and touch it...but if I stepped out...I'd reach for it and it'd pop in a second. Ha, ha, ha. All a pipe dream. Wake up, Curly. This is your life, God's punch line. Ain't it funny? Ha, ha, ha. Now wake the _hell_ up.

If I did it, I could never go back again...I'd never go back.

And I'd live that life alone.

Sometimes you need to stay locked up inside yourself. In the game of life, you get no safeties. You just free fall all the way. You're plummeting. You need anything you can get your hands to soften the inpact of ground zero. You throw people under the bus. You claw your way out of shit. You wake up screaming bloody murder. You wake up one day and you realize you're falling, and that, eventually, you're gonna hit the ground with a smack.

But in life, who got the last say? Who got it? Was it someone strong, like Tim? No—he'd go down fighting. Was it someone smart, like Jimmy Jones? No—he went down fighting.

I started thinking a little more. Maybe the Tigers were never his dream. It was just a dream he put in his buddies' heads to keep them from killing each other, or to keep him from killing himself. Maybe—maybe we're not real. Maybe all we are's just a dream we put in other people's heads.

I don't really know.

But old Jim Jones died for a false dream. Dad did, too. He died for glory—gunned down by all twenty magazines of it in a patch of knife-like grass in North Korea. I wondered sometimes if he thought it was still worth it as the bullets ripped through him; I wondered if he thought his war was still a noble one as he died alone in the sweltering jungle.

Mom abandoned her kids in a drunken haze, hoping to find something better for herself. She died, hopeless and helpless, slumped over the steering wheel-her heart had stopped. She died in the snowstorm. Her delusions killed her.

Tim lived for false realities. He died every day. The bitch killed him one day at a time. And Angie, my only sister, a hardass and a cunt and a bitch herself, was in the next room slowly losing her grip on the world.

I looked at my reflection on the floor.

I realized that, someday, I'd die, too.

My eyes started leaking silently down my face...and this time, I thought, I wished I didn't know why.

* * *

><p>I went in.<p>

Silence. Angie looked like she was ready to slip into a deep sleep. Her eyes were half-open. Her head laid flat against the pillow, steady like a stone.

I felt like I was looking at her from a million miles away.

The IV hummed.

"I'm sorry," she was saying. "I'm—"

I grabbed her hand, hoping that it would bridge the million-mile gap. I hoped she would get up, wake up, snap out of it—this wasn't going to happen. Her eyes weren't even black. The people who brushed with death always had eyes as black as fish eyes—eyes so metallic and so shiny you saw yourself in them. No—I knew it now—dammit, I knew it better now—

Her mouth quivered. They tried their best to clean all the blood off, but faint purple rings still wrapped around her wrists. Purple blood...I think my sister has purple blood. She's an eggplant.

I almost fucking laughed. I was going crazy.

"In Tim's room...there's a box in the cabinet where Dad kept his old revolver," she said, her mouth barely moving as she spoke. "I wrote you a letter and stuck it in there...I'd been meaning to give it to you ever since I..._moved out."_

She smiled at her own joke. Her eyes glistened—and for a minute, she was Angie again. She held it back. Good girl. She was too fucking tough for that.

"Damn you, Angel," I said.

She smiled even more.

Her eyes were bright and blue as she let go of my hand.

"It's okay now, Curl," she murmured. "I ain't scared no more."

The IVs hummed into the night even as she closed her blue, bright eyes.

"I got you," she said.

Then died.

* * *

><p>They told me later that Dallas had been shot in the chest through his back, and had been clipped at the top of his head. The first shot missed his lung and his heart by an inch...but he had already bled too much by the time I got there.<p>

The moment Angie said shot, my mind flashed to Dallas...the way he was always mind-fucking us, playing games, torturing Tim...how he left another big crack in Tim's windshield after slamming his fist into it.

I clutched at my hair.

_I always knew he was a sicko_, I declared.

Dennis just shook his head at the floor, and I knew he was thinking of Bennie.

But they said he was with her and couldn't possibly have aimed at himself. He had actually turned his back to cover her from the gunman. They said she must have pushed him aside when she heard the bullets go into him.

As for Angie...three bullets had been fired at her. One had gone into her left arm—the doctors said that if you got shot, the best possible place to get shot was either in the shoulder or in the forearm. Nothing too important was located there.

The second bullet went into her thigh. It struck a nerve, and she collapsed instantly because she wasn't able to hold herself up without that nerve in place.

The doctors said she still would have had a very good chance of surviving had it not been for the third and final bullet. The third, they said, went straight through her stomach and exited at an odd angle out her back, striking the lower part of her spinal cord. By the we got her here, she had bled so much internally they couldn't really do anything to stop it.

I looked down at my tennis shoes as they got a grim look on their faces. They sent Dennis away. I knew I was in for it, but I didn't want to believe what I thought they were going to say...was real...was true...

It couldn't be.

_No._

They took me aside, sat me down on the usual big hard wooden bench, and told me, softly, that the baby didn't survive the third bullet either.

I don't remember much of the next few minutes...

A slow scream radiated from my chest, bursting the needles apart.

* * *

><p><em>To be continued.<em>

_A/N: I feel really bad now. :(_


	7. Chapter 7

_Dear Curly,  
><em>

_Where to begin? I don't know. There's so many ways I could say this, but I know you like your facts simple and straight, so I'll just say what needs to be said first._

_I'm pregnant with Dally's baby. As I'm writing this, I'll be about ten weeks along. I know all the things you're probably gonna say when you read this—if you ever read this—but let me just say first that these things can and do happen. I decided to keep the baby. I'm not ashamed of him. He's comfortable in there, and I am, too. He's the size of a kidney bean but I feel him in there, and I love him already. His name's going to be David Arthur. You know, Dad's name. I hope Tim won't mind._

_I've been thinking a lot about me and Dally, too. I'm in love with him. I know—Tim said what do I know? But...there's something different about him now. He's not like we always knew him. He's always been there for us and we didn't even know it. He never asked anything from us. That's the real measure of a man, Curly. I hope I can raise my son to be like that._

_The other day I went to the kitchen when you were out, and I told Tim. I told him everything. He blew up at me. I knew he would. I knew it. I knew he didn't mean any of it...I just have a hard time convincing myself he didn't. It's still him, and it still hurts sometimes. I know it always seems like it doesn't, but what Tim thinks means a lot to me. A lot more than you realize—more than even I realize sometimes. I don't know. I'm really excited and really scared at the same time. You know what? Tim actually told me to get out. And it was weird, but I thought, Now I don't have to be kept here all day long...I can be my own person now. Whoever Angela Shepard is, she can be what she wants to be now...but in order for me to do that, I'll have to leave you two behind. To be honest, I'm more scared for you two than I am for me._

_I think it's best if I went with Dally. Guess what? He finally found himself a good station at the Slash J. He should be at Adams Street to pick me up. He told me to meet him there tonight. At first I said, No, no, I can't. He said, Why not? I said, Don't you know? Old Jimmy Jones is gonna be walking down the street. And he kind of smirked, like he always does, and he leaned in, and he kissed me. He doesn't think I'm that dumb little girl anymore. He's changed so much. He's not as...wild...as he used to be. But he hasn't lost what makes him Dally. He loves me. Me! Out of all the girls in the world. God, I've never felt so happy._

_Curly—I hope you don't think I'm a bitch. Two have been enough for Tim. There's only room in this family for one bitch, and that's me._

_Please don't let Tim beat himself up. I couldn't stand it if he worked himself up over me. I'll be fine, I promise. I'm a really lucky person, and besides, I got Dally with me now. You remember that time, a long time ago, when Timmy almost bled to death? He told you it was because he had to get used to the bitch. This is kind of my way of getting used to my own bitch. He should understand. And it's like you always say__**:**__ suck up your shit. Well, right now I'm sucking up all my shit and taking it back. Then I'm letting it go. Don't ever let anyone tell you that letting go is the same thing as giving in. It's not._

_I think that's what happened when I kissed Dally. I admitted I loved him, so I had already torn off that mask. I think some part of him did, too. When more people at school found out about me being pregnant, they started calling me everything under the sun—filthy, no-good, white trash. But you know what? Maybe I am filthy. Maybe I am no-good. Maybe I am white trash. And I am not sorry for it. Not one goddamned bit. You know why? Because I know that even filthy no-good white trash like me's still gonna bleed when you cut her open._

_But...it's been so hard on all of you. I see you get worked up over little things, and that frightens me sometimes. That shooting really got to you. Everbody's all shook up. I wish I could have been there in the ambulance when Tim had that episode, but I was just so upset, I started throwing up everywhere. Dallas stayed behind to help me. I told you this before, but you were beating on Tim's chest and making sores on him. I just thought, oh, Curly..._

_I see you now; your eyes are hard and afraid. I wish you'd just tell me what's wrong. I like it when you talk to me, really, I do: it's when you don't talk at all that I get upset._

_I talked to Kathy the other day. She was so upset over Two-Bit. You thought he was an ass, but—he was really a good guy. He and his mom let her stay at his house because her parents disowned her when they found out. Two-Bit came home every day to keep her company, you know, watch on her and stuff, because his mom had to go to work and his sister had school. She said he used to stay up until four in the morning just sitting beside her, talking, trying to make her laugh. It hurt Two-Bit a lot that Kathy was in pain almost the entire time. She almost lost her baby twice, you know. The first time, she was bleeding. Scary stuff._

_The second time, she couldn't feel a heartbeat. She started snapping at Two-Bit because she was all shook up and just feeling awful. It escalated after that. Soon, she said, they were fighting about useless little stuff. One day, she didn't mean to, but she yelled at him about a pair of curtain rods that wouldn't fit right. And he walked away. Didn't even laugh. You know that guy found everything funny, but he just went blank. Zero. _

_They had a falling-out that night, the night of the party. She didn't want him to go. Two-Bit finally blew up at her, said it was his own life and some other stuff she didn't want to repeat, got his jacket and slammed the door. I told her that he was obviously drunk—no way in his right mind—but she was crying, beating herself up real bad. She thought she'd pushed him away, too._

_At the hospital the doctors said Two-Bit was crying, asking for her. I'm glad they got to make up for it, at least, before he died. I didn't have the heart to tell her—they said he only had a few more weeks anyway with the extent of his injuries. I feel awful; they didn't deserve any of that. I mean, he'll never get to see his son being born, or raise him, or hold him, or see him graduate school. But Kathy said he had died for a minute on the operating table and already saw his little boy standing beside him. The boy said he was his son and that his name was Nate. The little boy wanted him to pass a tunnel into Heaven. Two-Bit told the little boy that he had to stay for one more day on Earth, just to tell Kathy how much he loved her. The boy said they'd let him go for one day, and then he had to stay—for good. The doctors were able to revive him for a little while. He told her everything, how sorry he was. She said they were laughing and bawling their eyeballs out at the same time, about their memories, about his meeting with their little boy, about everything. Two-Bit kept holding onto her hand like it was a life preserver. Her hand hurt from all that crushing, but she said it was a good kind of hurt._

_I think you know what happened the day after. Poor baby. I'm going to be there for her when she has Nathan. She's due in about a month and a half. When I get settled in with Dally, I'm going straight to the hospital to help her out. I should know—I'm just starting to get ready for that. I got nine months __to go. Knowing me, it'll probably feel like forever._

_And you probably heard that Ponyboy and Sodapop were taken away by social workers this Saturday. Well, Dally just told me they took them away because Bennie's parents had to have somebody play the fall guy—so they went and told the police that Sodapop had shot all of those people to cover up the fact that Bennie killed a bunch of people. Curly, right now I can't even see straight! The fucking disgusting things they did to that family—and the fucking pigs who believed them—they didn't even question nobody! Bennie was shooting, and we all knew it, we all saw Bennie do it...Darry tried to explain all of that to them, but the Commies just barged in and hauled them out to the car. Steve was there, too, and he was swearing and kicking so much it took all of Darry's strength to keep him from ripping their heads off. Sodapop said quietly that it wasn't a good idea to fight back, and Darry said Steve kind of sagged when he said that, like somebody just took an invisible pair of scissors and snipped the strings off a puppet. Steve's kind of like that now. He walks around like he's not really there. Well, because he was panicking, Darry began to panic, too. Dallas said he was talking to Johnny Cade that night—they were going for a walk down Highland Street—and they could hear screaming clear from there._

_When they got down there, Darry had already snapped and was trying to smash the car windows out with a baseball bat, trying to get Ponyboy and Sodapop out. I mean, they wouldn't listen to him at all—kept saying he wasn't fit to raise them, kept saying it was a bad neighborhood with bad influences—he got crazy. I'd be, too, if I worked as hard at keeping my family together the way he did. They had these big guys come right out of the car and he was down. Then those fucking bastards drove the boys to a home in Oklahoma City._

_What a nightmare. I can't imagine going through any of that. _

_I want you to tell Tim I said I'm sorry, and that I love him—he's never heard it from me, and I feel like I've let him down. I hope he forgives me, and he forgives himself...he takes everything into himself._

_Curly, what I'm trying to say is, before it might be too late—I know you'll probably never read this. And if you do, you might not ever talk to me again. I just want you to know one thing, Curly Shepard, as long as I'm alive, and that thing is: no matter what happens, no matter who you are, or what you're doing, or where you go, you'll always got me to love you._

—_Angela C. Shepard_


	8. Chapter 8

_A/N: I didn't want to interrupt the last chapter with this, but the "freak lightning" that Curly mentioned took down the barn whose ownership no one ever knew—that's in my story "People Like You and Me" (an early fanfic that's pretty much The Outsiders from Dally's POV). Dally and Johnny actually see the freak lightning that takes down the barn. ;D Hooray for story continuity! XD_

* * *

><p><em>It takes two men to make one brother.<em>

—_Israel Zangwill_

* * *

><p>"Timmy," I moaned miserably as I staggered into the house. My voice tumbled out as a hoarse, drawn-out moan that scraped the bottom of my throat. I hadn't had anything to drink for an entire day—I just wandered around town the day Angie died. I didn't even close the door behind me all the way. My shoes slapped the wood on the floor. Early morning mosquitoes tapped against the mesh of the door. Tap, tap, tap. The world swam around me. "Timmy."<p>

Silence. There was nothing in the kitchen but the clock ticking, or all of my blood rushing forth to my heart—I couldn't tell the difference at this point. I was tripping over things scattered on the floor—dark, blurry things—choking on my own silence—

"Tim."

His name rang out in the corners of the house.

"I know you're in here," I said, my voice getting hopelessly thin. "I need to talk to you."

Nothing.

"_Timmy,_" I pleaded. My legs felt like they were two ton weights just ready to crash down to the earth. I couldn't take another step further. I don't know why I was feeling so weak; it felt like the ground just got ripped out from underneath me. And in a way, it did. Angie was the ground...I should have held onto her more. I should have never let her go out there...I should have kept her here—

"_Dammit, Tim, where are you?_"

A minute later, I heard his voice trail down the stairs.

"Angie's—Angel's—"

I could barely get it out. Dammit—damn it—he's gonna whip my candy-ass for this.

I ran across the room and burrowed myself into his side. I guess it was my turn to be her now, the littlest unsure one, I mean. I honestly didn't know what to do. He was there, and he was Tim—the big huge hood standing like a sequoia tree in the middle of the room, staring blankly at me.

His stomach depressed a little. He was sighing.

He put his hand over my neck, like Dennis had at the hospital.

We stayed there for a minute. Then I broke away, and got a real good look at him as he sank into his chair. His face was ruddy and twisted. His hands shook worse than I'd ever seen them shake.

I said his name.

He said something inaudible. His mouth cracked open just like soil in a drought, as if he hadn't talked for years and years and forgot how.

I said: "What?"

He stared out the window. Dust swirled up in the squares of the yellow blinds. He had a habit of picking at the loose threads of the chair cushions whenever he had to think long and hard about something. He was tearing the cushions out now—you could see a few spots where the cotton puffs were pouring out altogether.

He studied the sun through the blinds. I couldn't figure out what color his eyes were today—his figure floated through my eyes as a huge dark blue shadow.

A morning shipment to Oklahoma City passed by, piercing the air for a while.

A round, dark stone bobbed up in his throat.

"I said, I know who did it," he said.

I looked up.

His eyes seemed larger than the sun itself.

He kept staring at me.

So I looked down.

He had the box she said she had put the letter in, the one that held Dad's—Dad's old revolver, the Smith and Wesson—nestled in his lap. Little chestnut box. The latch gleamed bright gold there in the early sunbeams streaming from the window. Dad had kept it real nice...

Dad had never opened it.

The world heard my heart pound above the wail of the passing coal train.

Just like a ticking time bomb.

_Tick, _  
><em>tock.<em>

He stared at me, waiting.

_Tick,_  
><em>tock.<em>

As he pulled out her letter, I realized I had just hit bottom.

_Tick,_  
><em>tock—<em>

Now I was starting to dig.

_Tick,_  
><em>tock—<em>

I supposed I shouldn't have even wondered why.


	9. Chapter 9

_A/N: A special shout-out to__ ILovePepsi2__: I'm sorry! That just isn't how I roll. This stuff happens in real life every single day. Myself, I've been blessed with a happy life, thanks be to God. But this is kinda my way of saying I understand it if you don't, ya know? The characters' pain reflect what we might be too scared or ashamed to see in ourselves. But that's not to say life is all bad, or should be. It does have its moments of light and love, and those little moments should be what we strive for...that's what I was just thinking, anyway...Kathy and Two-Bit...(musing) One-shot, maybe? We shall see._

_Thanks to all reviewers. I just realized that my writing's not the clearest thing in the world. Thank you all so much for sticking with it._

* * *

><p>Why?<p>

Why...one word throbbed in my brain. Why? Why? Why? And not just why Angie died. No—that one was too easy.

Why did we live this way? Why did we almost kill each other day after day, when we were supposed to be family? Especially when there was no mom and no dad to beat us down? Especially when we were supposed to work to stay together? Why did the Curtises get broken up? Shouldn't that have been me and Angela in the car that night, with Tim snapping and whaling like a crazy person on the windows? Why hadn't it been us? I mean, we weren't no saints, but...didn't we all know each other, stand up for the other when someone threatened us? We weren't no Curtises, but—weren't we at least a little bit better than the rich kids, who didn't give two damns if someone in their outfit got smashed up? Or did we just do it because some dead guy said we had to? Who knew these things? And how would I know if he knew when I found him?

Why didn't I wanna go home, where there was supposed to be a soft place to land? Why couldn't I tell my own brother to fuck off from time to time, just like any other kid? It hadn't been the MS—that I could deal with...it was something else. Why'd Dallas torture us here most of the time? How'd he fall in love with _Angie_—just another girl, too tough and too scared—if he didn't see something in her we couldn't? And Angie—why'd she get pregnant with Dallas Winston, the biggest hood on this side of town? What'd she see in him she couldn't see in us? Why did she have to run away to no-man's land? Weren't we good enough for her? Why couldn't she just stay here?

"You," I said finally. "You killed her."

He kept staring at the dust motes that swirled in the yellow air.

"You killed them both," I said. The room started spinning. "You found her letter before I did."

But, then, I realized, if that was true, he must have been rummaging around in the box that held Dad's revolver. No one was ever allowed to touch it; he didn't even look at it. He wouldn't have ever seen the letter in the first place, and then Angela wouldn't be dead. So why had he been looking in the box? He had no reason to...

...except for...

We started talking at the same time.

"I'm so sorry, Curly," he kept whispering through his teeth. His teeth gritted together as his eyes grew bright, and his Adam's apple kept bobbing up and down his throat. He kept shaking his head at the floor, too. He couldn't meet my stare. The passing coal train grew louder. "I'm fucked up inside."

"You couldn't take it," I said. "You knew she'd leave with Winston. You tried to lock her up, but she ran away. You read the letter because you been lookin' in that box, and you knew where they were going to meet up. You knew where she'd be."

"I was aiming at Winston," Tim went on. He spoke too softly, too fixedly. "My—my—my fucking hand kept trembling—"

I whipped around, slapping him to shut him up. "_Bull fucking shit!_" I screamed. "_Who're you tryin' to convince, me or yourself?_"

"I never meant—I was seeing red—_"_

I went to the kitchen and walked back out.

"Do you have any idea what you've done?" I said.

I squeezed my eyes shut. My gut lurched, and the bottom of my throat burned with acid—I was way too close to popping now. I turned around and let it out. My fist slammed down, and so did the anger and the tears that slipped all too easily now.

"_YOU KILLED OUR SISTER!_"

I felt the snap. I didn't open my eyes for a long time.

My blood hummed in my veins. The minute hand on the clock broke, and was stuck on an eternal five to seven, so I knew it had been my heart pounding in my ears this time. Tick, tock...tick, tock...tick, tock...tick, tock.

The steak knife stood seven inches out of his hand.

His hand stopped its eternal tremble. Large, gobbing black streams quietly welled up from where I drove it in, and glided down the armrest where he'd picked the threads off, staining the light blue rose embroidery with streaks as slow and as heavy as oil. Oil—was he a fucking machine? Was our family even fucking _human_? Last time I knew, my blood had been red. That's it. Just red. Winston's, too. But Angie—hers was violet. And Tim—just heavy, and black. It just kept coming out and out and out of him, slow and steady, glittering like oil from a spring.

He looked down. He didn't even scream. He was expecting it. He just looked down, closed his eyes, clicked his jaws, then looked up at me with that god-awful twisted look on his face, like he was about to start crying. His eyes gleamed red, as if he didn't even register physical pain anymore. Maybe he looked the way I felt. Broken.

Why was I playing Russian roulette with my own brother?

In Tim's silence, I heard Bennie's voice: _"No, not that. That game, you get five chances to win." _

Then it hit me. In the game of life, you get no safeties.

"_There's only one way you win this game."_

* * *

><p>He used his other hand to lift the latch of the chestnut box...and I realized—he was going to kill us one by one—<p>

But I didn't care. He wanted it this way? Fine. Let's play fucking ball, Timmy.

I got up, and pressed my stomach into the barrel.

"What are you doing?" he said.

"Go ahead," I said. "Go right _ahead._"

"No," he said, and drew the barrel up, pointing it towards the ceiling and away from me.

"Look," I snarled, "you already got one. Now you're gonna finish this."

"Curly—"

"_Do it!_" I screamed, clapping my hand down on his wrist. _"You sure didn't say that two nights ago! Come on, Tim, what're ya chickening out for now? The train's coming now, big guy! The train is fucking COMING!"_

He pushed me onto the floor with all of the strength left in his good hand, forcing the barrel into my gut. I went tumbling on my back. I looked up. The steak knife still stood out of his other hand. I could see it pierce clear through it; five inches of it had been sodded down with black. He towered above me, a dark, bleeding, writhing giant."_Dammit, I ain't hurting you!_"

His voice had been so soft and low that this made me jump back a little.

"Listen to me," he said, his voice descending. "Just listen, and maybe you might get it."

I spat on him. That was approval enough.

"You know when Bennie was shooting people?—I understood him. _Damn. _That's all that went through my head. _Damn._ You say he's crazy, you say he's sick. What do you know? Bennie didn't want to go to Nam. He wasn't crazy. He was just a guy who didn't want to take the shit life handed him."

"_What the hell does that have to do with anything?_"

"When you're sick, when you're off, when you're...different,"—he smiled— "people look at you fucking sideways. They don't see you. They see the sickness. If I told anyone about it, they'd say, here comes the bitch." His smile grew even wider as the veins in his forehead throbbed. His voice came in a dry, cracked gasp through his teeth. "There goes the bitch. Dally slashed MS's tires today. You think MS is gonna get home on time? And then the state says to you, MS, MS, you're not fit to take care of these kids. So I tried to be the best I could be. I tried to keep you outta trouble. I did."

I said nothing.

"I didn't want my brother and sister growing up like me—no mom and no dad, just living on whatever life handed you. It—shit, kid, it hardens you. It's like a train, when you play chicken and you look down, and you see your feet are cemented to the tracks. Kid, when Angie told me she was—was pregnant—with Dally's kid—I felt like the train already hit me. I don't know, I...I wasn't ready for all that. It was like he had come in and took her away from me when I wasn't looking. And then she just ups and goes, throwing everything I gave her away, and...and Dallas was my friend, too, Curl, and even though it might not look like it, I loved him, too...I mean... How could he do that to me? Why? Why now?"

Water started streaming silently down his face, chattering and hopeless in the morning light.

"When Bennie started shooting people—I understood him," he whispered. "What kind of sicko does that?"

I fell silent, too.

"I wouldn't have been able to take care of her—I would've had to send her off with the social workers. I was too scared. Scared for her. I knew the minute she opened her mouth and said, _I'm pregnant, _that she'd leave me alone, and then you would, too, because you love her just as much as I do. Maybe even more. You'd have followed her.

"And it's not because I couldn't take care of myself—I can. I just didn't know what I'd do when you left. I'd probably go crazy like when I was punching holes in my arm. Don't you think I miss Mom and Dad? I missed them every single fucking day, but I got up every day because I knew I'd have somebody to come home to—and who'd listen to me when life handed me shit. I could have sent you away, but I didn't. I wanted to keep us together, to prove myself I could do it, to do right by you."

He almost smiled—I'll never forget it. It was broken and white and quivering and...fucking beautiful.

He said: "Because I loved you two, Curl. I kept us together because I loved you more than I hated myself."

Tim turned Dad's old Smith and Wesson once in his good hand, burrowed it slightly into his cheek, and shot himself in the face.

* * *

><p>I caught him as he stumbled forward. He crashed into me before he slid down, and as he did, he kind of sighed into my arm, his chest decompressing like a balloon deflating.<p>

He was dead before he hit the floor. There was nothing left to fill the air now but the whistle of another coal train headed to Oklahoma City.

I looked down. I put my hand on his head, trying not to think about anything. He wasn't in pain anymore, I thought. At first, I didn't know if the bitch had won, or if he had surrendered. I was young then...I didn't know there was a difference. I'd seen guys go down swinging, but this...had somehow been braver than any of that. Tim felt things too much. He had to—no one who's sick can't say they feel nothing. And he had to get real hard and tough to make up for it. He and Dally saw much of the same thing in each other.

Some kids, like me and Ponyboy, played chicken to show how tough we were. Tim just lived every day.

Some kids died to show how big they were. Jim Jones warranted his own death. Tim had been driven to his.

The bitch wouldn't take him alive—she drove him to that edge; she was the one holding the gun on Adams Street; she ripped our sister away from him that night. He fought her the best he could—

But he'd never have that.

"You needed to trust us," I murmured. "But you didn't."

The greatest fear we have ain't dyin'. That's the easy part. No. The greatest fear we got is dying alone.

Then I snapped. I filled the silence in our house...because I was through with silence and with words, and because silence was just another word for love.

* * *

><p><em>To be continued.<em>


	10. Chapter 10

_A/N: Last chapter. Bonus points to anyone who can figure out the two things that are up with Kathy in this chapter. Not one, but two! And don't say she's pregnant, 'cause she already is! Thanks to everybody who reviewed and helped along the way! Cookies to all! And also...last chapter! Get yo' dibs in before they're gone, y'all!_

* * *

><p><em>I am nine years old, wishing for some sympathy. Tim can't offer me any right now—he's holding Angela up to a woman who will take us in for the night. I turn and scuff my foot a little against the ground. He told me that that's the way kids get adopted—if they look real sad and cute, like they do in the movies. But I saw us in a reflection passing by the television repair shop—disheveled, tired, red, dirty as pig's ears. I kept thinking to myself there was no way the lady'd let us in. Besides, Angela's nose kept running and she'd been screaming all day.<em>

_The inside of a house is filled with warmth. It's the first time I know what a furnace is. There's a loud clock in the kitchen, and upstairs is where she put Angie—in a bed on the floor in a small, dark room with blue wallpaper. Tim would tell me later that she miscarried a baby boy._

_He never told me that the lady who took us in hung herself that night._

* * *

><p>I went down a few blocks to borrow Dean's old XLCH Sportster. I sniffed as I kicked the stand out. Have you ever smelled something with your mouth? Not tasting, I mean, but not smelling it fully with your nose? Yeah—that. I smelled fire in my mouth. Fire poured down my throat from the flavors of gas and leather the chopper gave off. Dean had a good girl, I'll say that. Maybe I'll get myself one one of these days.<p>

Tim never knew it, but I knew how to drive a motorcycle ever since I was ten. Bobby Jay gave me secret lessons in exchange for not picking on him anymore. Almost killed the two of us when he popped a wheelie going down Route 45 one night. His dad laid the leather his ass. And me? I split before the fuzz showed.

I wanted to go alone. Besides, I needed fresh air slapping my face to wake me up, and I didn't really wanna get trapped in that gas chamber the twins had smoked up in the back seat of their Continental.

_Try not to get bugs in your teeth_, Dean said.

I tried to think about only that as I drove to the cemetery. Wasn't working too well—the air had been blue and bright. Too blue. Too bright. I wished I could see that kind of bright blue again. But I knew I wasn't.

I slumped against the wall in the shower this morning. I almost couldn't get up. Now I know what you're thinking, and no, I was perfectly sober...it's...it's just...it's just the easiest way of making you think you're not crying, is when you're in the shower and the water's stabbing your face.

* * *

><p><em>I am ten years old when I first try to climb an electric fence.<em>

_Angie stares at me, wide-eyed._

"_Whaddya lookin' at, small fry?" I say. "Get outta here!"_

"_Hey, I ain't no small fry!" she huffs, putting her hands on her hips. _

"_Big cod, whatever—go home!"_

_Someone throws a rock at me. It stings my face and knocks me down before I can even stand upright. If I could stand upright, that is._

"_You're outta your territory, kid," Angela says indignantly, even though the kid is a few years taller and older than her. He looks like he could pick her up and squash her in his hands. He has an amused look on his face that I'd come to hate for years._

"_Name's Winston," he says, taking out a match. "Yours is mud."_

* * *

><p>"We came as soon as we could," people I never knew I knew kept saying. "I'm so sorry."<p>

It seemed awfully funny to me that people cried for you when you died, but never blinked twice at cutting you out of their lives when you were alive. But I know better now. Now I know what death is. It's a wake-up call to everybody living. We get so caught up in our lives, we don't even remember who really is the rock beneath our feet. Then death comes; someone gets cut out of the big picture somewhere, and we realize we got a gaping hole in the photograph we never knew was even there.

Tim always said I thought too much, that I should stop torturing myself. But it seemed funny he'd say that; the kids who thought too much were fucking A-list smarties, like Ponyboy and Angie. I'd always laugh in his face. Me, thinking too much? Well, fuck me tender—I definitely didn't fit that bill. There were some things I did without thinking—who'dya think jacked that liquor store six months ago, the fuckin' tooth fairy?—but when I finished, I'd torture myself..or my mind would, anyway. So I guess the old guy had been onto something. No one ever had to send me to jail to get punished. That was all me. The things that came afterward were just icing on the cake—things I could deal with better than being locked up inside my own head. Sometimes I'd think I was the one who killed Mom and Dad. Sometimes, in jail, I'd go for days on end without eating, thinking they wouldn't want me to.

It's like Darry said...we could all be sick inside...if the right thing came along.

And who did Tim drive to the reformatory twice? I don't know. But it wasn't me. The real me hid behind his shadow; and now the real me was standing blind in the sun.

* * *

><p><em>I am eleven years old when I first learn where babies come from.<em>

_Angela hates sleeping alone during a thunderstorm. Her black head lay atop Tim's chest. Her fists clutch at his shirt, which is damp with her drool. She pins Tim's arm. Eight years old and already she's a ton of bricks. But he doesn't seem to mind it too much._

_"Tim," I say, shaking his arm a little. "Hey, Timmy."_

_He cracks one eye open, shifting his arm carefully._

"_What?"_

"_They come from big white birds," I say. "The kids down the street said so."_

_He looks at me, then down at Angie. Then he closes his eyes, yawns, and says: "I know."_

* * *

><p>I went out for a smoke. Someone stood outside the back door of the church.<p>

"Curly," she said.

"Kathy," I said.

She watched me as I threw my stick into the brush.

"I wanna talk to you about something," she said.

I shrugged.

We walked over to a little stone stoop that jutted from the door, where she sat down. She sank just like Tim had. Everybody must sink when they're sick, I thought. Must be something in the air.

"I'm sorry about your sister," she said, watching a few birds peck for seeds in a patch of grass nearby.

"Yeah, well," I said, kicking a part of the ground in with my toe, scattering the birds, "a whole lotta people been sorry for a whole lotta things lately."

"She told me Tim was sick."

"She say anything else?"

"No. Just that he was sick."

It didn't matter now, but I let out a little sigh of relief.

"You know," she said. "I never told anyone this."

She looked down at her belly.

"He means everything to me," she said quietly, "and he ain't even born yet...but it don't mean he's not real. I feel like I known him a million years...and Mom and Dad tried telling me he ain't real. They tried to—to—but I couldn't. They kicked me out, so I stayed with Mrs. Matthews. She's a godsend. I don't know what I would've done if it wasn't for—"

"Two-Bit?" I said.

"He's...gone...now..." She smiled a slow smile at her stomach, blinking hard. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "...but that don't mean he's not real."

I said nothing.

"You probably think I'm being all mushy and stuff. Keith did, too."

"Kathy," I said. "He loved you."

He didn't say it, but he did. And she knew it. She'd always known. Probably always will. There's something about those people who'll never forget the first person they loved...you can see it in their faces.

I thought briefly about Angie.

Kathy bit her bottom lip, nodding slowly. She didn't say anything for a long time, so I started to get up—

"Curly."

I looked down at her. She didn't meet my eyes, but was cradling the globe that held the baby she almost lost...now three times. I lowered my eyes; I probably shouldn't have said anything about Two-Bit.

She said: "Some people would understand more than you think."

* * *

><p><em>I am twelve years old, getting my first lesson in patience.<em>

_I can hear his voice screaming through the water, but through a long, dark tunnel. It's early morning. I'm on the ground sucking stones, trying to breathe, but all I can inhale is the sour sting of ice cold water seeping through my lungs. _

"_Gonna take that back, grease?" they ask me._

_I say: "No."_

_One of them grabs my hair and dunks me in again. _

"_You can hold your breath longer than that," he says. His voice is the thick of a dream. I can hear the valves of my heart swing open and shut, loud as bass._

_They shove me in again. It's at the back of The Dingo, inside the freezer where they keep ice water to store the sodas in. One of the workers was a double agent, and I threatened to tell. You should know the rest._

_They shove me at the bottom of the pool-thing again. I can't fight back—they've got another two of them pinning my arms behind my back. I twist, I jerk, I buck, but they keep piling—I swear, they're like rabbits—they keep multiplying._

_They wait longer with every turn...my eyes burn with the cold of the ice...one...two...three...I can't breathe. I've lost the zen of the cold. I can't breathe, is all I think, and then I start to panic. I can't fight back—I need to go up; that's all I want. Up; up; up; oh sweet Lord, I need up._

_They keep me under until the bubbles stop coming._

* * *

><p>Why was life peaceful only after the violence was done? I don't mean I never been a dove or any hippie shit like that, but—but why did the dust settle only after somebody died for it? Was it because we—I—wouldn't notice it otherwise? No one was there to tell me why the candles' silence somehow hung lighter in the air than Tim's silence. Why the sky had been bluer and brighter only after Angel's blues and brights had faded. Why I shouldn't feel like jumping in the ground along with my brother and sister.<p>

Everybody looked at me. Their eyes bored into my face. The minute I snapped, they'd light the fuse: _Is he okay? He's only got 'imself now, poor old fucker. Wonder what happened there. _I wasn't sure if I wanted to be there when the bomb went off.

But I realized halfway during "Ave Maria" that if I just sat there, being silent, I'd be no better than Tim ever was. If I kept my mouth closed, the bitch would win, and go off to another family, somehow, somewhere, and rip them apart one by one.

* * *

><p><em>I am twelve when I first see Tim cry. Tears roll silently down his face, in large, leaking streams. Dally slings an arm around his shoulder, reigning him in. Tim sinks into himself, his face contorted with rage and confusion.<em>

_I am twelve years old when I first die in the ER._

* * *

><p>They're expecting me. I can't go back—<p>

"There's something you don't know about Tim," I said. "Something I think you should know."

It's now or never.

"Tim was born with something called MS," I said. "It's when your brain doesn't make your nerves the way it should. Imagine lying face-down on a bed of nails and having a rock sit on your chest. You'll have MS. It can't be cured. He had it every day of his life—it affected him all his life. It'd do funny things to him, and they changed from day to day...we didn't know if he'd flare up or just wear himself out."

I paused for a minute, studying the ground.

"I know a few of you saw him lying on the ground the day of..." I paused again. "...the shooting...you saw me pound on his chest. He, uh, he wasn't having a heart attack. That was an episode. Sometimes he'd start twitching, you know, have an episode like a seizure, and he wouldn't breathe. I used to have to pump on his chest to get him to start breathin' again. He had episodes like that almost every day. We just didn't know when they would come, or, if they came, how bad they'd be. But he hid it real well; he hid it because, for the most part, most people couldn't see it. They just saw Tim. And he hid it for years 'cause he thought everyone would start singling him out if he didn't."

_Fuckin' tough_, I saw a wide-eyed Dennis mouth to his brother.

* * *

><p>"<em>Fuckin' tough."<em>

_I see him trying to form the words. He can't._

_They bring those paddles down on me, and I'm suddenly jerked down the tunnel and back into my body like a rubber band being snapped back in. The machines whir to life. Then everybody in the room scatters, and they drug me up so bad, I never remember any of that until years later._

_It's the first time I realize that was Tim's way of saying "I love you."_

* * *

><p>"My sister—" I have to finish; I need to— "—was pregnant."<p>

There was a murmur among them.

I looked down; Kathy's eyes were quiet and blue.

So I continued.

* * *

><p><em>I am thirteen years old when they first haul my ass to the station. "Welcome to the show, kid," Dally says. He's being put in for Jiffy-Pop—arson—when all he was doing was throwing lighters on the sidewalk 'cause he couldn't afford sparklers for the Fourth of July. He's drenched in lighter fluid; one whiff of the stuff makes my throat swell up.<em>

_When Tim gets there, the first thing he does is whip me with the flat side of his leather belt. He doesn't say anything. He unbuckles it right then and there, goes to the bathroom, sticks his arm out, waves his hand, and tells me to "C'mere."_

_Winston laughs as he hears Tim whip me in the bathroom of the police station._

* * *

><p>Last rites, people came and went. My hands were still cold. Shaking. Need a light.<p>

"Steve and Cade go home already, Curtis?" I called out.

He nodded. Never seen him in anything but a roofing get-up before. He looked so spiffed-up I woulda mistaken him for a Soc.

"Winston?"

"Police took the body," he said, running a hand through his hair.

I spat on the ground. Fuck the police.

"Tim said you was goin' into the reformatory for the next six months," he said. "What happened? You get good behavior or somethin'?"

"Nah," I said. "I bust out the first night."

He coughed as he shook his head. "Man, you won't never change."

I shrugged.

He didn't say anything else, just stuck his hands in his pockets.

We stared at the ground for a while.

* * *

><p><em>I am fourteen years old when I learn where babies come from.<em>

_...I know._

* * *

><p>"Curly," he said finally.<p>

I looked behind me.

He said: "You know the door's always unlocked."

I looked at him for a minute. Then I glanced at the horizon. Everything sank into the red cup of dusk, gathering the blood of the sun.

I said: "I'll think about it."

Darry smiled a small smile.

Then I kicked the stand, and I was off.

* * *

><p><em>The End.<em>


End file.
